Contents

Introduction

1. The acceleration of the destruction of the human environment and its consequences

1.1. Almost all the indicators are red

1.2. Climate change as a central question and a major threat…

1.3. … But not the only one

1.4. The dangers are underestimated rather overestimated

1.5. A major amplifier of the social crisis

2. Ecological crisis, crisis of capitalism

2.1. Points of no return are exceeded

2.2. The systemic crisis of capitalism threatens the humankind and its environment with major destructions

2.3. The imposture of “Green capitalism”

2.4. Populism, nationalism and climate denial

3. Struggles, demands and ecosocial strategy

3.1. An ecosocialist emergency plan

3.2. Wage-labor, alienation and ecosocialism

3.3. Women struggles and ecosocialism

3.4. Agrarian question and ecosocialism

3.5. Indigenous peoples, buen vivir and ecosocialism

3.6. Self-management, control and political outlet

3.7. Science, technology, self-management and decentralization

3.8. Environmental destruction and the social role of scientists

3.9. Self-organization of the affected populations

3.10. Localization, decentralization and internationalism

4. Ideological Fights

4.1. Ecosocialism as an ethical struggle and a project of civilization

4.2. Marx’s Ecology: source of inspiration, work in progress

4.3. De-growth and ecosocialism

4.4. Ecosocialism and “true nature”

4.5. Religion and ecological crisis (to be written)

5. Conclusion: ecosocialism or barbarism (to be written)

Introduction

INT.1.The pressure humanity exerts on the Earth System has been growing ever more rapidly since the 1950s. At the beginning of the 21st century, it reaches an extremely alarming level, and continues growing in almost all areas. The risk is now real and serious that this increasing quantitative pressure, observable everywhere and in most fields, leads at any moment to a qualitative shift that could be abrupt (a few decades) and largely irreversible. The Earth System would then enter a new dynamic equilibrium regime, characterized by very different geophysical and geochemical conditions, and a marked decrease in its biological richness. At the least, in addition to the consequences for other living creatures, the transition to this new regime would endanger the lives of hundreds of millions of poor people, especially women, children and the elderly. At the most, an ecological collapse of global proportions could lead to a collapse of our own species.

INT.2. The danger increases day by day, but the catastrophe can be conjured, or at least limited and contained. It is not human existence in general that is the determining cause of the threat, but the mode of production and social reproduction of this existence, which also includes its mode of distribution and consumption, and cultural values. The mode in force for about two centuries – capitalism – is unsustainable because competition for profit, which is the driving force, implies a blind tendency to limitless quantitative growth, incompatible with the limited flows and cycles of matter and energy in the Earth system. During the 20th century, “really existing socialism” was unable to offer an alternative to the productivist destruction of the environment. At the beginning of the 21st century, humanity is confronted with the unprecedented obligation to control its development in all fields in order to make it compatible with the limits and the good health of the environment in which it has developed. A political project can no longer ignore this conclusion of scientific studies on “global change”. On the opposite, every political project must be assessed first of all on the taking into account of the risk, the systemic responses it brings, the conformity of these responses with the fundamental requirements of human dignity, and their articulation with its program in other areas, particularly in the social and economic sphere.

1. The acceleration of the destruction of the human environment and its consequences

1.1. Almost all the indicators are red

1.1.1. Anthropogenic pressure must be understood in its entirety, by grasping all the facets of environmental degradation, their interactions with each other, and their interactions with human development. The IGBP’s work identifies nine parameters of resilience to ensure the existence of the humankind under right conditions: climate change, destruction of the ozone layer, damage to the integrity of Biosphere (loss of biodiversity), introduction of new entities (chemical molecules, nanomaterials and radioactive materials), ocean acidification, freshwater consumption and impact on the hydrological cycle, soil degradation, alteration of the biogeochemical cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus, and aerosol atmospheric loading.

1.1.2. For each of these parameters, the researchers proposed a threshold of dangerousness. The first study, published in 2009, estimated these thresholds were crossed in three areas: climate change (the dangerous level of atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases is most likely exceeded), damage to the integrity of the biosphere (The current wave of extinction of species – the sixth in the history of the Earth – is faster and wider than the previous one, sixty-five million years ago, which corresponded to the disappearance of dinosaurs), alteration of the nitrogen cycle (human activities convert more atmospheric nitrogen into nitrates that asphyxiate aquatic life than all natural processes taken together). The update of the study, published in 2015, added a fourth threshold: changes in land use (deforestation, extension of cultivated land, drying of wetlands, fragmentation oh habitats). There was no assessment of safety thresholds for “new entities” and atmospheric aerosols.The state of the stratospheric ozone layer is the only area where the planet’s global health bulletin is improving (emissions of ozone-depleting gases have decreased by 80% since the entry into force of the Montreal Protocol, in 1989). This single positive point shows it is possible to act but does not change the general picture: the overall situation of the human environment is already catastrophic.

1.2. Climate change as a central question and a major threat…

1.2.1. The increase in the Earth’s average surface temperature as a result of the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is more than likely the most important parameter of ongoing destruction, and this parameter is connected to several others ( acidification of the oceans, loss of biodiversity, changes in land use, atmospheric loading in aerosols, in particular). The average global temperature has risen with 1.1 ° C since the pre-industrial era (warming is three times greater in the Arctic and the Antarctic Peninsula) at a 0,17°C/decade rate between 1970 and 2015 (170 times greater than the average Holocene variations). Without radical measures, global average warming could reach as much as 6 ° C during the 21st century (nearly twice as much as the increase in temperature since the last glaciation, 20,000 years ago). Between 1970 and 2015, atmospheric CO2 increased 75 ppmv, a rate of 16.6 ppmv/decade which is 550 times greater than from the mid-Holocene just prior the Industrial Revolution and 100 times greater than estimates of the natural CO2 increase during the last glacial termination. By 2017, the atmospheric CO2 concentration reached 410 ppmv (parts per million by volume), unprecedented for at least 3 million years.

1.2.2. This phenomenon of unprecedented rapidity is almost entirely due to the anthropic emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and various industrial gases (with high radiative power – “warming” potential). The most important anthropogenic emissions are carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) and, to a lesser extent, deforestation. The current atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide significantly exceeds the threshold of dangerousness, which would be around 350 ppmv. Anyway, we are very close to a tipping point from which climate change would begin to wriggle non-linearly as a result of “positive feedbacks”. It is almost certain, for example, that the summer retreat of the Arctic sea ice is an irreversible phenomenon; this reduction means less solar radiation is reflected by the Earth (albedo effect), and therefore the acceleration of warming. Another positive feedback is the release of methane from thawing permafrost; it is very disturbing because the radiative power of this gas is some thirty times higher than that of CO2. Up to now, forests and oceans continue to absorb about half of the CO2 emitted each year, playing the role of carbon sinks. A weakening of this absorption capacity (the transformation of the Amazon into a savanna, for example) would constitute a major tipping point. But maintaining the CO2 absorption capacity of the oceans is hardly less serious: the dissolution of carbon dioxide leads to water acidification, which threatens marine life as a whole.

1.2.3. There is no doubt that we are in the danger zone close to very large, non-linear and irreversible changes involving, inter alia, a several-meter rise in sea level (6-13 m according to paleoclimate stdies), an intensification of extreme weather events and a decline in agricultural productivity. The urgency is maximum: according to scientists, the humankind will have exhausted within 15 years at most the “carbon budget” giving it a 66% chance of not exceeding a 1.5 °C warming, compared to the pre-industrial era. However, it is not certain that a warming of this magnitude would not itself have very serious consequences.

1.3. … But not the only one

There are many indicators that Earth’s biota is suffering major deleterious changes especially from the last decades to the present. For instance, the population of vertebrates in the wild declined 58% between 1970 and 2012, due to the combined pressure of overexploitation (including overfishing), environment destruction, degradation and contamination, climate change, invasive species and diseases. Oceans are not only becoming warmer (temperature approaching one degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels), but much more acidic and with 2.1% less oxygen in only 50 years. Ocean acidification is already 3-7 times greater and 70 times faster than it was during the termination of the last glacial and global change scenarios of little to no mitigation are projected to make the cold oceans subsaturated with respect to aragonite (one of the forms of calcium carbonate) before the end of this century, making it impossible for many forms of life to survive, with impacts in all marine trophic levels. The loss of oxygen is directly associated with climate change, as warming the water surface enhances stratification and inhibits vertical motion and mixing, reducing the oxygen flux to the deep ocean. Another enormous threat to marine life is the huge amount of trash, as there is now one ton of plastic for each five tons of fish in the Earth’s ocean with chances of reaching a 1:1 proportion as early as 2050, in a business-as-usual scenario.

1.4. The dangers are underestimated rather overestimated

1.4.1. The uncertainties of scientific projections do not in any way call into question the reality of the threat or its imminence. In many cases, it is to be feared, on the contrary, that they result in underestimation rather than overestimation of danger. All projections are tainted with greater or lesser uncertainties. It is known, for example, that the influx of phosphorus into the waters can cause the death of the oceans by anoxia and that this phenomenon already occurred abruptly in the history of the Earth, but the threshold of dangerousness remains undetermined. Uncertainties of this kind do not doubt the reality of the threat or its possible imminence. In many cases, it is to be feared, on the opposite, that they result in underestimation rather than overestimation of danger. By way of example, the negative consequences of the 100,000 molecules produced by the chemical industry, which do not exist in nature, and of which some are not or very difficultly decomposable, are becoming increasingly well known (many of them are carcinogens or endocrine disrupters that affect reproductive capacity), but the cocktail effects of these substances are less known, and the impact of nanomaterials even less: it is more than likely that better knowledge in these fiels will lower the threshold of dangerousness relative to this parameter, which could thus be crossed as well.

1.4.2. Actually, every advance in knowledge leads to the conclusion that the dangerousness thresholds must be lower than in previous estimates. As an example, the two degrees of warming are no longer considered a safe limit. The underestimation of hazards is well established in the climate field: climate science is increasingly fine, but the reality of the observed effects, while confirming the theoretical assumptions, is often considerably worse than the projections – the annual increase observed for sea level, for example, is clearly higher than the projections by mathematical models. This underestimation of hazards is due in particular to the conservative nature of research syntheses (the case of IPCC reports) and the difficulty of capturing non-linear dynamics. However, subjective phenomena, such as self-censorship of researchers who are often reluctant to fully take into account their own most extreme conclusions, must not be overlooked. At the same time, the ideological conceptions of scientists can also bias their conclusions in the direction of underestimating possible solutions, so that the possible outcome seems to come only from faith in technological breakthroughs, not in the ability of humankind to self-regulate its development and its exchanges with the environment. The IPCC WG3 provides an obvious example of ideological bias: “Climate models assume markets that operate fully and competitive market behavior” (IPCC, AR5, WG3). Scientific policy, as well as funding mechanisms for research, facilitate these ideological biases, leading to questionable conclusions. Consequently, effective and relatively obvious proposals to avert the catastrophe or at least to limit it are not taken into account because they call into question the social mode of production and the resulting relationship between the humankind and the rest of nature, which is enough to classify them as “utopian”.

1.5. A major amplifier of the social crisis

1.5.1. The destruction of the human environment is now a major amplifier of the social crisis. It affects health systems, especially as they are undermined by austerity policies everywhere. Air pollution causes almost 3 million premature deaths every year worldwide. Fine particles caused by fossil fuels combustion are responsible for 6% of lung cancer deaths. For example, air pollution is the main environmental health risk in the EU-28 and its cost to health systems is estimated between 330 and 940 billion Euros / year. According to the World Health Organization, some five million deaths each year are attributable to chemical poisoning.

1.5.2. Just as it is at the center of environmental destruction, climate change is at the center of the social impacts of environmental destruction. Many examples, including examples from the so-called “developed” countries, show that it exacerbates social inequalities – class, gender, race. In addition to direct casualties, extreme weather events (floods, droughts, heat waves, cyclones, etc.) destabilize the livelihoods of indigenous peoples, contribute to the ruin of small farmers, accelerate the concentration of land ownership, the private appropriation of places and resources, degrading the living conditions of the poorest layers of society. The rise of these climatic risks reduces certain territories and those who inhabit them, favors speculation on others.

1.5.3. Warming, rising sea levels, salinization of soils, desertification, thawing of permafrost, etc. are now new determinants of population migration, in particular the rural exodus that swells the megacities surrounded by slums. This in turn creates new social and ecological problems. Social feedback is generally negative, particularly for women, who are faced with greater difficulties in securing their livelihood and that of their children without the relative autonomy afforded them by their often major role in food production. The environmental causes of migration are generally combined with human causes, such as chronic underemployment, racism, repression of democratic freedoms, major new infrastructure (dams in particular), mining, wars and the like. More than 160 million refugees are estimated to be, at least in part, environmental refugees. Climate refugees alone would already be over 25 million. Most of these people are internally displaced, but in the extreme cases of some small Pacific island states, whole peoples are threatened with uprooting because their country will disappear.

1.5.4. The control on resources threatens to become a new cause of conflicts, including water wars in arid or desert regions. 150 to 200 million people may be forced to move in the coming decades as a result of an 80cm rise in the ocean level. Overall, under the current mode of production, there is no possible adaptation to a warming by 3 ° to 4 ° C with the human population of nine billion people projected by the end of the century. Having no status, ecological refugees are those who run the greatest risk of being considered “too much” in relation to the “carrying capacity” of the planet. Reprinted in green and combined with racism, nationalism and imperialism, Malthus’ anti-poor logic, by “naturalizing” the humanity-nature relationship, risks making the ideological bed of an unprecedented planetary barbarity whose premises are already before our eyes.

2. Ecological crisis, crisis of capitalism

2.1. Points of no return are exceeded

2.1.1. The acceleration of global change appears clearly in the profile of the curves showing the evolution of the different parameters of the ecological crisis as a function of time: all show a very marked inflection point in the early fifties of the last century. The connection with the post-war long wave of economic expansion is evident. Since the 1970s, there has also been a clear link between continuing increases in atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and aerosols and the “just in time” globalization of production and trade, including the transformation of China into the workshop of the world, highly dependent on coal, and the explosion of transport. There is also a clear link between the so-called “Green Revolution” and the global acceleration of chemical poisoning, pressure on freshwater supplies, declining biodiversity and changes in land use.

2.1.2. These accelerations are such that a series of no return points are already exceeded in the evolution of the Earth System. The hundreds of species that have disappeared because of human activity are forever; The level of the oceans rose by 20 cm in the twentieth century; The increase resulting only from the supplement energy already accumulated in the Earth System (not taking account the future emissions) will cause inevitably and at least a new rise by several tens of centimeters by the end of this century, and could exceed three meters in equilibrium (in a thousand years or more ); Many synthetic chemical compounds will remain tens of thousands of years for lack of natural agents capable of decomposing them; Radioactive materials will continue to contaminate the environment for thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years.

2.1.3. These are irreversible impacts on the geological scale of time, the traces of which will remain inscribed in the physics and chemistry of the globe. It is justified to draw the conclusion that the Earth has entered a new geological epoch (or even a new period or era), which succeeds the Holocene. It is also justified to consider that this era begins after the Second World War, for geology takes into account only the geological facts – not their premises, which do not fit into the earth’s crust. The fact of calling this era “Anthropocene” is questionable, because this denomination may tend to impute change to the human species rather than to its historical mode of production of its existence. But (i) the consequences of capitalism will not disappear with ecosocialism; (ii) the proposed dating displaces this ahistorical and essentialist interpretation; (iii) it is a question of learning from the long history of pre-capitalist environmental destructions, as well as the recent experience of the serious environmental destruction committed in the 20th century by the USSR and other post-capitalist countries: the abolition of capitalism is only a necessary condition, in no way sufficient to the resilience of the Earth System.

2.2. The systemic crisis of capitalism threatens the humankind and its environment with major destructions

2.2.1. It is not nature that is in crisis, but the relationship of humankind to the environment, which is determined by the form of social relations. The exponential growth of the resources taken and the waste discharged which marks the entry into the Anthropocene stems from the very nature of capitalism. This mode of production only aims at the production of surplus value through the exploitation of unpaid labor. This exploitation has been imposed historically by the violent private appropriation of resources, a dispossession the system reproduces and expands unceasingly, for it conditions its existence. Market competition constantly forces capitalists to increase labor productivity by replacing workers with machines, to lower their costs. They can thus reduce their prices and increase their market share, hence their profit. But they then contribute diminishing the average amount of human labor needed, and thus the value of the goods. The effects of the resulting decline in the average rate of profit can be offset only in four ways:

  by increasing the rate of exploitation of the labor force, 
 
  by increasing the mass of goods produced (thus the amount resources exploited) 
 
  by plundering more free natural resources (hence the tendency of capital to extractivism), 
 
  and by reducing the cost of the reproduction of the force (by transferring them to the free labor carried out mostly by women in the domestic sphere and decreasing the value of consumer goods). 
  2.2.2. The capitalist development now encounters a double limit, social and physical. On the one hand, compensating for the fall in the rate of profit by raising the exploitation rate and reducing the cost of reproduction is met with resistance and other social difficulties. On the other hand, compensation by the increase in the mass of goods depletes certain resources and worsens the destruction of the environment in general, to the point of threatening the stability, even the survival, of capitalism. The fact that competition compels Capital to increase efficiency in resource use, recycle waste, and even promote a “circular economy” does not solve the problem. Increased efficiency and recycling are aimed at increasing the quantity of goods to compensate for the decline in the rate of profit, not at reducing the environmental pressure. Moreover, this increase is a decreasing function of investment which also contributes to a reduction in the average rate of profit, and consequently leads to an increase in the exploitation rate and the mass of goods as well as to the reduction of the reproduction costs of the force … The so-called “dematerialization” does not bring a structural solution either: the information and communication technologies need huge amounts of energy. Generally speaking, all these developments are based on a massive, concentrated and centralized global accumulation of fix capital financed on credit, so that the relationship between needs and production is profoundly reversed. Thus, the very dynamics of capital lead it more and more to “Producing to produce”, which also means “consuming to consume”, always more and more quickly. The resulting contradictions cannot be solved otherwise than by a gigantic “creative destruction” of capital.

2.2.3. Earlier societies in history remained based directly on natural productivity. In these societies, a crossing of the ecological limits was temporary, and was paid in cash. Pushing the limits was possible by developing the population, knowledge and agricultural techniques, but respecting a “metabolism” with nature. Capitalism has broken this metabolism. Thanks to fossil energy resources, science and technology, it has been able to develop “above ground”: the destruction of European forests has been reversed by the replacement of wood by coal, disruption in the nutrient cycle has been stopped by the invention of synthetic fertilizers, the depletion of natural resources has been circumvented by petrochemical products, and the acidification of the rains has been greatly reduced by the regulation of sulfur and nitrogen emissions. These responses may have seemed to have immediate positive ecological effect, but they would bring the fundamental problem of the limits of development back to the future, making it more complex and creating new environmental threats. As warnings by scientists, particularly over half a century ago, have not been heard, the problem comes back in the form of a crisis that is no longer local and partial but global, general and systemic. Capital is caught up by the long-delayed effects of the fundamental antagonism between its need for growth and the finiteness of resources. This crisis reveals the destructive force it has borne in it from the beginning, which has only grown in the course of its development and which is freed periodically. It is so profound that “creative destruction”, as at the end of the 1930s, is likely to include once again a barbaric destruction of “surplus” labor power, by war or other means.

2.3. The imposture of “Green capitalism”

2.3.1. The crisis undermines legitimacy and threatens the stability, even the very survival of the system. Most capitalist leaders are now aware of this. They are particularly aware of the need to act to limit climate change. The previous successful actions to save the stratospheric ozone layer show this is not impossible. But to cancel the greenhouse gases emissions, particularly the CO2 emissions, by way of the kind climate measures of regulation and quota that have proven effective in banning the production and use of ozone-depleting gases is no longer possible today without calling capitalism into question. This is the result of the urgency of global warming and of the centrality of fossil fuels in the economy – as a source of energy, raw material and the basis of key sectors such as car industry, aviation, etc. Climate policy therefore remains neoliberal, and therefore insufficient ecologically, while being socially unfair.

2.3.2. The example of Germany, the imperialist country most advanced in the energy transition, is enlightening. The exit of nuclear power is planned, but increasing areas are sacrificed to the exploitation of lignite, the costs of the transition to the renewable sources (“Umlage”) are transferred to the consumers, several thousand large companies are exempted in the name of competitiveness, “gray emissions” in imported products are not accounted for and governments are hampering the reduction of emission standards in the car industry. The development of wind energy cooperatives attests to the possibility of a decentralized renewable energy system, socialized and placed under the democratic control of the populations. But capitalist social relations have another dynamic: in a first phase, “citizen” cooperatives attract mostly the savings of the upper middle strata, which more than compensate for the extra cost of electricity imposed on households; in a second phase, these cooperatives are involved in the process of concentration and centralization of capital. As a result, the transition is destructive, inferior to opportunities and necessities, and the disadvantaged are the only ones to pay for it.

2.3.3. The agreement reached in Paris at COP21 illustrates more generally the ecological impotence and social injustice of “green capitalism”. In accordance with the methods of “governance”, this agreement was prepared undemocratically by “high-level strategic dialogue” between major powers, international institutions and major capitalist groups. It is silent on fossil fuels and contains no concrete measures to lower the emissions. Nationally determined contributions put in perspective a warming at least twice as high as the maximum 1.5 to 2 ° C warming target adopted at the COP.

2.3.4. “Green capitalism” is an imposture. It combines technological fetishism (the myth of a technological breakthrough in reconciling the crisis and the revival of growth), the fetishism of commodities (the myth of an internalization of externalities – carbon tax or feed-in-tariff – as a way to achieve sustainability), widespread appropriation / commodification of ecosystem functions in order to (try to) ’offset’ emissions, and biased indicators (the share of renewables tends to substitute for the atmospheric concentration of CO2eq, while both can increase at the same time, as is the case, though). This strategy is doomed to failure because it does not question accumulation nor private ownership of the energy sector. The same criticism must be addressed to the idea of a carbon tax, the product of which would be fully shared among all citizens and which would function as an incentive to take over the ecological transition by these citizens. This proposal (fee-and-dividend) does not guarantee compliance with the constraint in terms of reducing emissions. It remains within the framework of the strategy of green capitalism – the internalization of externalities – and in the liberal ideology of consumer freedom.

2.3.5. The key issue of accumulation appears concretely at three levels: the carbon bubble (at least 4 / 5th of the fossil reserves must be destroyed as capital), competition between firms (to grow or to die), and geostrategic competition between powers (which relay competition between companies). The North-South issue is an additional challenge and an expression of the same puzzle. Indeed, without massive transfer of clean technologies and finance, and above all without fairly sharing the “carbon budget” on base of historical responsibilities, the countries of the South should choose between the evil and the deep blue see: to give up development, or to accelerate the disaster.

2.3.6. The absolute urgency overlooks everything. At the current rate of emissions and absorption, the still available 1.5°C “carbon budget” will be depleted in about 2030. Confronted with this challenge, capital takes on three directions: a senseless revival of nuclear energy, the widespread appropriation of “ecosystem services” as a new field of valorisation, and geoengineering technologies.

 Despite the accidents at Three Miles Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, as well as the risks of nuclear weapons dissemination, the IEA is counting on a growth of more than 60% of the world’s nuclear power capacity, mostly due to investments in the so-called “emerging” countries. More than 70 nuclear reactors are under construction and 160 are planned.

 The widespread capitalist appropriation of ecosystems and their capacity to absorb carbon is openly advocated by “green capitalism” think tanks that require governments to create attractive conditions and guarantee property rights for this investment in what they describe as “infrastructures “.

 However, these responses promise to remain insufficient, and investors are increasingly interested in geoengineering technologies. The most mature of these technologies, Bio Energy with Carbon Capture and Sequestration (BECCS), combines the uncertainties of geological carbon sequestration and threats, either on food production or on biodiversity, or on both, because the area needed to produce biomass energy would be huge. On the one hand, the social and ecological consequences of this kind of absurd technological choices are likely to be incalculable. On the other hand, this project BECCS in particular is especially attractive for capital, because it combines a service it can be paid for by the collectivity (removing carbon from the atmosphere) and power production. In the event that this insane project would effectively postpone yet again the hour of truth of capitalist productivism (as the invention of synthetic fertilizers did from the end of the 19th century), the result would be to put the thermostat of the globe, so to speak, in the hands of Capital, which would then have unprecedented absolute power over the humankind.

2.4. Populism, nationalism and climate denial

2.4.1. Despite its ideological biases, scientific expertise sheds light on capitalist impotence and objectively charges the sectors of capital most opposed to an ecological transition. This impotence and this indictment are unbearable for the fossil fuel sectors and for the most reactionary layers of the capitalist class. Through the controversies about tobacco and the hole in the ozone layer, capitalist trusts have developed a perverse method to undermine scientific expertise in name of pseudo-science and the right to debate. This method has been applied in particular to deny the reality of anthropogenic climate change. This denial funded by fossil capitalists has been defeated on the ground of science, and defeated within the “elites” of big capital, who rely on “green capitalism”. But the fossil lobbies that finance the “doubt merchants” do not admit defeat. They are inspired by how the tobacco industry has managed to protect its profits. To achieve their ends, they are counting on the rise of populism, which opens up new possibilities for them. The election of Trump is a success for these capitalist circles who have been acting for decades to cancel the EPA.

2.4.2. The climate negationism of the new US President does not invalidate the capitalist awareness of the climatic emergency. It is either an element of a protectionist and nationalist populism that demagogically amalgamates scientists with the “elite”, environmental regulation with statism and climate agreements (among others) with globalization, and thus with the destruction of jobs and the democracy. In addition to the pressure of the fossil lobbies, in particular coal mines, this climate negationism is a facet of a global reactionary spirit that also includes machism, racism, creationism, anti-Semitism, hatred for equal rights, malthusianism, extractivism … In short, in name of the freedom, the refusal of any constraint imposed on the rich, and the will of the rulers to maintain their privileges at all costs, crushing the struggles for emancipation, designating scapegoats and destroying the planet. Trump’s climate declarations are seen as aberrant by the majority of international and US big capitalists. The fact that such a person was able to become the president of the first world power shows the depth of the systemic crisis. This crisis favors a rise of the irrational within the ruling class and accentuates the relative autonomy of the political sphere. Within this framework, in certain circumstances of acute political crisis, individuals can play a decisive role to the point of imposing their own project.

2.4.3. Trump’s climate-denialism is counter to the ongoing capitalist energy transition – including in the United States. It will encounter severe diplomatic, economic, institutional and social obstacles. But no capitalist leader will break with the United States to save the climate of the planet. So, the danger is real. The actual impact will have to be measured in practice. Although US emissions account for only 10% of global emissions, Trump can significantly deepen the gap between the official target of Paris on the one hand and the commitment of nationally determined contributions (NDC) on the other. The NDC of the USA is insufficient, and the measures taken by Obama only allow to realize 83%. The Clean Energy Plan, abolished by Trump, represented 14% of the US commitment. By eliminating certain other measures (engine efficiency, building insulation, gas leaks, etc.), Trump could reduce the US commitment by 50% or more. Such a policy would further enhance the difficulty and urgency of future policy in trying to catch up with the damage. In a capitalist framework, the risk would increase in particular to see the capital resort to geoengineering. However, the biggest threat is not the widening of the climatic-negationist plague to other countries but a shift in the social forces (favored by unemployment and racist poison), populist-protectionist contagion and a global change in relations between powers, with an escalation of geostrategic tensions, and even wars for hegemony. In this scenario, the climate issue would be returned to the 10th priority (there was a precedent under the presidency of L. Jonhson: contrary to Trump, Johnson had been made aware of the climate threat, but the Vietnam war came in the forefront). A runaway climate change would then become inevitable and terrifying weapons (chemical, nuclear, depleted uranium, etc.) would cause death and destruction on an unprecedented scale.

3. Struggles, demands and ecosocial strategy

3.1. An ecosocialist emergency plan

3.1.1. An entirely different relationship of humankind to the environment, based on the “caring” of humans and the environment, is an urgent necessity. The development of science and technology creates objective conditions more favorable than ever, but this different relationship can only materialize in the context of a completely different relationship between humans, necessitating the total and complete eradication of capitalism. This eradication is indeed the sine qua non condition for a rational, efficient and careful management of the matter exchanges between humanity and the rest of nature.

3.1.2. The response to environmental destruction in general and the danger of climate change in particular is not support for green capitalism and the Paris agreement as a “lesser evil”, but a global emergency policy that satisfies real human needs, that is, the needs determined not by the market, but by a democratic deliberation, allowing the populations to emerge little by little from the market alienation. Such a policy has as a precondition to break with the productivist logic of capital accumulation by the implementation of profound structural reforms aimed at eliminating poverty and radically reducing social inequality as well as the sphere of the commodity.

3.1.3. The key demands in this perspective are:

3.1.3.1.- the socialization of the energy sector: this is the only way out of fossils and nuclear power to rapidly make the transition to a renewable, decentralized and efficient system, according to ecological and social imperatives;

3.1.3.2.- the socialization of the credit sector: this is essential given the interweaving of the energy and financial sectors in heavy and long-term investments and in order to have the necessary financial resources for transition investments;

3.1.3.3.- food sovereignty and protection of biodiversity through land socialization, agrarian reform, and the transition to local ecological and local peasant agriculture, recognized as being of public interest, free of GMOs and pesticides, with reduced production / consumption of meat and respect for animal welfare: this is a decisive way to reduce emissions, increase absorption, protect biodiversity, clean up the environment and promote environmental awareness;

3.1.3.4.- socialization of water: this is absolutely necessary within the framework of a policy aiming at social equality and promotion of an ecological agriculture based on the peasants;

3.1.3.5.- the abolition of the patent system, in particular the immediate prohibition of patenting living organisms and energy conversion / storage technologies. Significant public refinancing of scientific research and the end of systems that submit research to industry

3.1.3.6.- the abolition of private ownership of forests and their public management in accordance with the needs of biodiversity, water resources management, carbon storage and their social function

3.1.3.7.- recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples

3.1.3.8.- the abolition of unnecessary or harmful productions (weapons, petrochemical, nuclear), planned obsolescence, with collective retraining of workers, under workers’ control,

3.1.3.9.- the development of public enterprises aimed at job creation through the implementation of the ecological transition regardless of profit, under workers ’and citizens’ control (in particular in the fields of electricity generation, construction-insulation-renovation of buildings, mobility of people through the exit of the “all-car” system, recycling of waste and repairing of ecosystems)

3.1.3.10.- the collective radical reduction of working time without wage loss, with lower work rates and proportional hiring: together with the development of the public sector, it is the best way to reconcile production reduction, full employment and democratic transition;

3.1.3.11.- the extension of free goods (basic food products) and services (public transport, education, health care, etc.)

3.1.3.12.- the abolition of public debts (without compensation, except for small holders) and a redistributive tax reform to bring capital and wealth to bear;

3.1.3.13.- at least one per cent of the GDP of the rich countries for development aid. The absolute distinction between this aid and the fulfillment of Green Fund commitments ($ 100 billion / year) to be made in the form of grants (no loans). Public management of the Green Fund, not by the World Bank but by the representatives of the countries of the South, under the control of communities and social movements;

3.1.3.14.- the taxation of international air and maritime transport;

3.1.3.15.- the extension of the workers right to organize and exert control in the workplace, in particular on occupational health, product sustainability, production efficiency, etc. Protection of early warners (alert launchers? “lanceurs d’alerte” in French) on these issues within companies;

3.1.3.16.- refugee status for victims of ecological / climatic disasters, freedom of movement and settlement and full respect of democratic rights for refugees in general;

3.1.3.17.- a long-term urban reform aimed at breaking land speculation, “disartifying” the city (urban agriculture) and freeing it from the car for public transport, fostering community gardening and soft mobility;

3.1.3.18.- a long term socio-economic policy favoring a rebalancing of urban and rural populations consistent with the objectives of ecological agriculture, food sovereignty and ecosystem care;

3.1.3.19.- a family planning policy based on sound social security systems, ensuring adequate life and pensions, including the right of women to voluntary abortion and to free contraception.

3.1.4. This program is not exhaustive: it is and will continue to be enriched continuously by concrete struggles. What is common is defined by the social process of its democratic construction, not by nature which would make certain things “common”, while others would be doomed to private appropriation. The above demands do not therefore constitute a key door-to-door solution: they indicate the general way forward for an anti-capitalist, internationalist, ecosocialist and ecofeminist issue that will change all spheres of activity (production, reproduction, distribution, consumption) and will be accompanied by a profound change in cultural values. They are applicable separately, but an end to the crisis is possible only through their coordinated and planned application.

3.1.5. These measures form a coherent whole, incompatible with the normal functioning of the capitalist system. There is no other way to deal with the urgency of the situation. This coherent whole responds to the major contradiction of capitalism already highlighted by Marx and that is today more acute than ever: whereas the general productive force of society (science and technology) could radically reduce working time, render to labor its sense of conscious collective activity, producing a good life to which each one could contribute according to his abilities, the accumulation of value continues to depend on the theft of the working time of others, a miserable base whose Capitalism cannot do without, for it is its very essence. In this context, the strategic importance of the radical reduction of working time without loss of wages and the extension of the sphere of free provision as well as of the public sector under democratic control must be stressed.

3.2. Wage-labor, alienation and ecosocialism

3.2.1. The exploited and the oppressed can alone lead the environmental struggle to the end because the abolition of the capitalist system corresponds to their class interests, but capital incorporates the worker by the purchase of his labor power. Chosification and destruction of the environment are therefore not an external consequence of the wage-labor relationship, but a constituent element of it – just as the chosification and destruction of the wage-earners themselves, as well as the invisibility of the work of reproduction, or the ruin of the small peasant. Under the “normal” circumstances of the capitalist mode of production, the daily existence of the proletarians depends on the functioning of the system which mutilates them directly and indirectly – by mutilating their environment. This contradiction makes it very difficult to mobilize the labor movement in the ecological struggle. The difficulty is increasing in the present period due to mass unemployment, the decline in class consciousness and the deterioration in the balance of forces with employers.

3.2.2. The majority leadership of the trade union movement is in favor of class collaboration with the project of “green capitalism”: the “just transition” “with respect for business competitiveness” (ITUC Vancouver Resolution). They have the illusion that the capitalist transition, if concerted, will massively reduce unemployment by reviving growth through “green” production. Faced with this dominant trade union trend, certain sectors are inclined towards populism and protectionism, or even climate denial, in reaction to the fact that climate defense serves as a pretext for capitalist attacks, or in the illusion that they will be able to avoid the destruction of jobs in the fossil fuels sectors. Fostering a debate on ecosocialist alternatives and helping to uncover a left-wing left with capitalism and class collaboration in trade unions is therefore a task of prime strategic importance.

3.2.3. Left-wing sectors are taking part in environmental struggles – f.i. “Trade Unions for Energy Democracy” and the “Climate Jobs Campaigns”. However, these sectors are generally in a minority and are not always clearly antiproductivist. Developing, coordinating and radicalizing them requires a lot of patience and tact. But it is possible because the consciousness of the gravity of ecological destruction of the planet by the race to profit also grows in large layers of the working class. It grows in a diffuse way, which leads too little to ecological positions assumed by sectors of the labor movement, but it materializes at other levels and can suddenly turn out in case of general mobilization. Apart from such mobilizations, the huge objective constraints of the transition – in particular the necessary global decrease in material production to stabilize the climate system – seem impossible to the mass, which contributes to fueling a feeling of helplessness, or retreat into individual lifestyle changes.

3.2.4. The defense of the health of workers is an important means by which the ecological struggle can be taken over by trade unionism as such. Indeed, the deterioration of the balance of power between capital and labor has resulted, in particular, in a deterioration in working conditions, which has led to a worsening of capitalist attacks on the health of workers, particularly the most precarious workers. The fight against the increase in occupational diseases thus constitutes a lever to encourage the employees’ awareness of the fact that Capital destroys both the Earth and the laborer. This destruction of the laborer includes rising psycho-social risks, resulting not only from the forms of organization and control of workers, but also from the environmental damage that many workers are forced to realize on the order of capital. The defense of the health of workers is also a lever for the often difficult convergence of the demands of the workers of polluting companies, the surrounding populations – which also suffer from this pollution – and movements for the environment.

3.2.5. Plans aiming at job creation through a regulated ecological transition (“One Million Climate Jobs”, etc.) is another way of driving the worker’s movement into the struggle for the environment, linking this struggle to the fight for defense and the extension of a public sector under democratic control of the population. But it is not enough to show that transition can create jobs, it is necessary to do it respecting the ecological constraints and the principle of the differentiated responsibility of North and South countries in the warming. Workers in a company or sector who require their employment through conversion to green products must be supported unconditionally. However, comprehensive plans to create “climate jobs” on the scale of developed countries cannot circumvent the necessary global reduction in material output. It is therefore decisive that these plans incorporate the radical collective reduction of working time without wage loss, alongside the demands for the development of the public sector. The CRWT is indeed an antiproductivist claim par excellence. Marx had already noted this: it is the privileged means of “rationally managing the exchanges of matter with nature in the respect of human dignity”, that is to say reconciling full employment and suppression of useless or harmful productions, and planned obsolescence.

3.3. Women struggles and ecosocialism

3.3.1. Indigenous peoples, peasants and youth are at the forefront of environmental struggles, and women play a leading role in these three sectors. This situation is the product of their specific oppression, not their biological sex. Patriarchy imposes on women social functions directly linked to “caring” and place them at the forefront of environmental challenges. Because they produce 80% of food production in the countries of the South, women are directly confronted with the ravages of climate change and agribusiness. Because they take on most of the child-rearing and home maintenance tasks, women are directly confronted with the effects of environmental destruction and poisoning on health and education.

3.3.2. On the ideological level, women’s movements remember the experiences of instrumentalization of women’s bodies in the name of science (forced sterilization campaigns, etc.), which favors a critical view of pseudo-scientific mechanistic rationality as an instrument of domination and manipulation.

3.3.3. Women also have a special, valuable and irreplaceable contribution to the development of a global anti-capitalist consciousness which favors the integration of struggles. By fighting against the patriarchal appropriation of their bodies as well as their natural reproductive capacity, and against the exploitation of the free domestic work which they carry out to a large extent, women stimulate the understanding that capitalism relies not only on the appropriation of nature and the exploitation of the labor force by wage labor but also on the patriarchal invisibilization of the labor of care and reproduction of the labor force. These three pillars of capitalism have, in the last instance, a common denominator which is the appropriation of natural resources, of which human workforce is a part. Women’s struggles (i) for the right to control their bodies, sexuality and reproductive capacities, (ii) against sexist discrimination in the wage labor market and in production in general, and (iii) for social recognition and the sharing of domestic work are thus an integral part of the ecosocialist struggle. They deepen it and widen its horizons.

3.4. Agrarian question and ecosocialism

3.4.1. Farmers and agricultural workers are the world’s most heavily involved social sector in the fight for the environment in general and climate in particular. This vanguard role is attributable to the brutal aggression of capital which wants to eliminate the independent peasants to make agricultural workers or franchised workers – producing cheap goods at low cost for the market rather than quality food products for local populations – or unemployed, weighting on the wages. It is also the result of the organizational and awareness-raising work carried out by peasant unions such as Via Campesina.

3.4.2. Unlike salaried workers, small-scale farmers are not incorporated into capital. Although production for the market tends to impose productivist objectives and methods on them, they also retain the mentality of the craftsman who is anxious to do “fine work”. Aggressed by a powerful capitalist enemy, they mobilize to retain or reconquer the ownership of their means of production. But the very unequal balance of power in the face of agribusiness and large-scale distribution forces them to seek alliances with other social movements, especially with employees. They also understand the extra legitimacy they can get by explaining and assuming the ecological importance of their struggles. As for agricultural workers, especially illegal seasonal workers who are over-exploited, they mostly have little prospect of becoming peasants or of leaving the ultra-precarious margins of wage-earners. Anti-capitalist struggle is their only alternative.

3.4.3. The importance of the agrarian question should not be judged by the proportion of farmers in the labor force, but based on five objective facts:

3.4.3.1.- The challenges of human nutrition and the threats that mass distribution, agribusiness and industrial fishing pose to farmers, fishermen, communities, consumers and the environment, as well as to the emancipatory struggles in general (through dependence on world markets, which gives multinationals a terrible means of pressure on peoples). Changes in consumer behavior cannot drive the ecological transition, but their food choices can support reorientations at the production chain level that have a significant ecological impact. This also contributes to breaking the feeling of powerlessness in the face of the ecological crisis. At the same time, this issue has an acute class nature, as consumer choices are limited by the capitalist tendency to lower the value of the reproduction of the labor force and by wage policies that impoverish workers. So, large-scale, low-cost distribution plays a major role: it enforces a massive solvent demand for junk food and poor agribusiness products, including micro-credit. The agrarian modes of production are thus at the center of decisive stakes of human health (obesity, cardiac diseases, allergy…) and the protection of the environment, which reveal the destructive force of capital. The demand of “food sovereignty” makes it possible to unify consumers and producers around a fight and practices generating anti-capitalist consciousness.

3.4.3.2.- The important role of women in agricultural production and the impact of women’s oppression on the productive deficit. Women make up 43% of the agricultural workforce in so-called “developing” countries. Patriarchal discrimination is reflected in the smaller size of their farms and livestock, the lower level of mechanization, a heavier workload for a lower yield (due to the weight of non-productive chores – water and timber), less access to training and credit, and, for employees, status that is more precarious than that of men. The emancipation of women farmers as women is one of the decisive conditions for addressing both the challenge of food and ecological agriculture. It is therefore an ecosocialist issue in itself.

3.4.3.3.- The agricultural-forestry sector as a whole (including upstream – production of inputs, machinery, etc. – and downstream – processing and distribution) is responsible for more than 40% of greenhouse gas emissions. Agribusiness is also a key agent for chemical poisoning of the biosphere, while industrial fishing and water pollution by agribusiness are key determinants of the biodiversity loss in aquatic environments. At the same time, warming threatens land productivity and acidification due to warming threatens that of aquatic ecosystems.

3.4.3.4.- Biodiversity loss will not be stopped mainly by the creation of nature reserves but by the development of an ecological agriculture instead of agribusiness. Moreover, reducing greenhouse gas emissions to zero is no longer sufficient to curb climate change. In the coming decades carbon must be removed from the atmosphere. Peasant farming and rational forestry are the only means of achieving this removal efficiently and safely, without resorting either to geoengineering or to the generalization / appropriation / commodification of ecosystems. Thus, the protection of biodiversity and of the climate 1 °) reinforce the need for the ecosocialist alternative 2°) materially found the decisive place of the agro-ecological farming / food alternative in this overall alternative.

3.4.3.5.- The transition to environmentally friendly agriculture (and fisheries and forestry) is a major condition for building an ecosocialist society. This aspect is of the same importance as the democracy of producers and the use of 100% renewable. However, agroecology is more labor-intensive than industrial agriculture. The transition to sustainable forestry and the restoration / protection of ecosystems entail an increase in the share of the population invested in these activities. Yet the example of countries such as Venezuela, where nearly all the population is urbanized and depends almost exclusively on the world market for its food, shows that it is very difficult to reverse the trend. Avoiding this extreme point requires a long-term policy of upgrading agricultural trades, training workers and equipping rural areas with infrastructure and personal services.

3.5. Indigenous peoples, buen vivir and ecosocialism

3.5.1. In North, Central and South America, Africa, Asia and Oceania, indigenous peoples are also in the front line. Their struggle often combines with that of peasants and rural communities, but it is specific. Indigenous peoples produce their social existence from a direct relationship with the environment they have shaped and which constitutes their environment of life. As a result, these peoples are on the road to many powerful capitalist players who are eager for natural resources to plunder: oil, gas, mining, wood, pulp, meat multinationals, agribusiness, Pharmaceutical sector, not counting the carbon offsetting financiers disguised as ecological defenders of the forest (and environmental NGOs completely integrated with green capitalism and the imperialist system). All of these extractivist plunderers generally act with the complicity of national governments and local authorities, who invoke development goals and ecological needs to conceal their greed and neocolonial contempt for indigenous peoples. For their part, these peoples generally have no title or property to the resources of their environment. They have no other means but the struggle not to end up as wretched agricultural workers or as sub-proletarians in a shantytown. Through their struggle, the indigenous peoples protect and make known their cosmogony, which is a precious asset to the whole of humanity and an inspiration for ecosocialism. But it is not this cosmogony that explains their role as a vanguard: this role derives rather from the fact that these peoples are pushed their backs to the wall in their last entrenchments after centuries of spoliation and colonial humiliations. In this unequal struggle, they fully and rightly use the “ecological crisis” to find allies among other social movements and thus improve the balance of power in their favor.

3.6. Self-management, control and political outlet

3.6.1. The profound changes in lifestyle and development prospects that ecological transition requires cannot be imposed from above, either authoritatively or technocratically. They are only feasible if the majority of the population acquires the conviction that they are indispensable and compatible with a significant improvement in their living conditions, hence desirable. It is a question of spreading popular education (“éducation permanente” in French is a specific concept, don’t know the equivalent in ENGL) about the severity of environmental destruction and its causes. In the face of capitalist impotence, it is a question of stimulating democratic processes of active control, of taking charge of transition, of intervening in public decision-making, and even of joint appropriation of production and social reproduction, as well as the protection of endangered ecosystems. By their very nature, these processes combine with the struggles of oppressed nationalities for their social rights and democratic right to self-determination. It is a matter of sketching in practice the invention of emancipated relationships between human beings, and between humanity and the rest of nature, to show that “another world is possible”. Through these practices, and through the social sectors most involved in struggles, it is a matter of weighing on the workers’ movement to combat the influence of productivism within it.

3.6.2. The movement for the divestment of fossil fuels and the transition towns movement must be encouraged and actively supported. In general, the experiences of workers’ control, citizen control, participatory management and even self-management, as well as women’s struggles for social recognition and the sharing of domestic tasks, favor an anti-capitalist consciousness and project including the ecosocialist dimension. Experiments in cooperative ecological agriculture, particularly in Europe but especially in Latin America, demonstrate this and have an influence also in the labor movement. Many self-management production experiments also involve licensed workers, excluded and precarious workers, even “sans papiers” migrants and asylum-seekers. These alternatives provide an immediate response to massive and permanent social exclusion, which degrades the lives and dignity of people. They have an important place in an ecosocialist strategy because they refuse fatalism, create solidarity, exceed the circles of environmental activists. It is, however, an illusion to believe that their generalization by contagion to society as a whole would make it possible to avoid the ecological catastrophe: structural socio-economic measures, in particular the socialization of credit and energy, are absolutely necessary. Transition initiatives must be based on the requirement for democratic transition planning that includes both meeting social needs and respecting ecological constraints. Without such an articulation, these initiatives may have an effect of depoliticization, or even constitute a siding.

3.6.3. The struggle against major fossil infrastructures is a key element in the general movement of interference, control and transition. Mass demonstrations, occupations of sites, mines, and civil disobedience campaigns make it possible to concretely oppose the “growth” and “extractivist” dynamics of capital. These fights have a key importance in defending the ecosystems and the human communities that live there / who have shaped them. They are of strategic importance in defending the climate because the current level of infrastructure constitutes a bottleneck in the development of fossil capital. They constitute a privileged means of laying bridges between the struggles of peasants, indigenous peoples, youth, women and, from there, to challenge the labor movement to join the struggle. The international networking of these resistances makes it possible to improve the balance of power, to dispel the accusations of NIMBY and to reinforce the legitimacy of the demands. In some cases, this can lead to partial victories, or even impose reforms which, while remaining within the capitalist framework, can serve as a basis for subsequent radicalization.

3.6.4. The necessary convergence of social and environmental struggles is not a gathering on a stable compromise between the environment and the social. It is a dynamic process of clarification, recomposition and radicalization. Such a process involves multiple conflicts between social sectors, particularly conflicts with sectors of the labor movement that engage in class collaboration with productivism. While demonstrating the necessary tactical sense and emphasizing the benefits of the ecological transition to the workers (especially in terms of jobs and health), it may be necessary to dare the conflict with the worker’s movement under productivist influence. This conflict must then be conceived and used carefully, without provocation, to stimulate debate on alternatives, to find allies and to awaken among workers a sense of human responsibilities deeper and more fundamental than the sense of responsibility subsumed by capital. In this way, the ecosocialist struggle can contribute to uncovering within the unions a leftist break with capitalism and class collaboration.

3.6.5. To win the labor movement and other social movements in the struggle for an ecosocialist transition program is ultimately achievable only by the emergence of political alternatives with a majority vocation, the objective of which is to apply a comprehensive plan of structural anticapitalist reforms that satisfies both social needs and environmental constraints. Without the construction of such political alternatives, and without their articulation on social movements, this joint satisfaction will always be a chimera, so that the environmental will be sacrificed on the altar of the social, or the latter on the altar of the first. The creation of an ecosocialist government that breaks with capitalism through social mobilization is the cornerstone of an ecosocialist emergency program. But there is no possible ecosocialism in one country. The formation of such a government is, in its turn, only a transitory stage of a permanent process which aims at the overthrow of capitalism on the whole surface of the globe. So, this government bridges a revolutionary internationalist outcome to the systemic crisis of capitalism.

3.7. Science, technology, self-management and decentralization

3.7.1 “The Commune is the political form finally found of the emancipation of labor,” wrote Marx in his work on the Commune of Paris. In the 19th century, capitalism created an increasingly uniform and centralized energy system, whose technical and political control involved a large bureaucratic apparatus and a complex system of delegations of power. This system is obviously not the cause of the bureaucratic degeneration of the USSR – which was the result of the Stalinist counter-revolution – but it has favored it to some extent. Conversely, the flexibility and modularity of renewable technologies are no guarantee for socialist democracy, but they open up new possibilities for anticapitalist structural reforms aimed at decentralized territorial development, organized around the democratic control by local communities of the renewable energy resources available on the site and its use. This is particularly the case for the use of solar potential (thermosolar power stations) in semi-desert regions, hydroelectric potential (micro-power plants as an alternative to mega-dams) in mountainous regions, wind and marine potential in Islands and coastal regions, etc. But the realization of these possibilities depends on the class struggle. The confiscation of only part of the fortunes accumulated by the Arab petromonarchies would suffice to finance regional projects of alternative development of the Near and Middle East based on the solar energy and directed towards the satisfaction of the social needs at the local scale. Similarly, it is deplorable that the so-called “progressive” Latin American governments have not invested the revenues of fossil exploitation in social and ecological phasing out transition plans aimed at another type of decentralized development: democratic, more balanced urban-rural, community-based and 100% renewable.

3.7.2. Renewable energy technologies also modify the link between structural measures and control or self-management experiences at the territorial level, with new possibilities for energy autonomy opening up. The project of a democratic eco-social society based on a network of decentralized bodies of power thus regains topicality and credibility. This field of struggle is particularly important for the countries of the South, as part of an alternative development model to the imperialist model, also including food sovereignity.

3.8. Environmental destruction and the social role of scientists

3.8.1. Capitalist responses are insufficient ecologically and socially unjust because they are biased by the assimilation of market rules, which are social rules, to unavoidable natural laws. This reality pushes some scientists to engage in public debate and struggle. Their commitment is against the background of the increasing fragmentation of research and its increasingly strong subordination to the needs of capital and its temporality. In this context, an opportunity arises to redefine “knowledge” and return it against capital. It is further enhanced by the rise in certain sectors of the ruling class of irrationality and the denial of objective facts, two reactionary traits embodied in particular by Donald Trump. Ecosocialists must help to ensure that this opportunity is seized with all hands. It is not a question of subjecting the social movement to the dictatorship of “science” or of experts, but rather of putting expertise at the service of the social movement and subjecting it to its criticism. This can greatly increase the credibility and legitimacy of anti-capitalist options. In particular, the experience of international cooperation of scientists is an important asset to develop internationalism.

3.9. Self-organization of the affected populations

3.9.1. The means of warding off the catastrophe that is coming are terribly behind schedule. “Anthropogenic” ecological disasters are therefore likely to multiply, particularly due to extreme weather events (floods, cyclones, etc.). This creates situations of disorganization and chaos exploited by speculators and exploited for domination (political, economic, geostrategic). At the same time, these same situations may be conducive to initiatives aiming at building solidarity networks that are alternative to imperialist agencies, as well as self-organization of aid, reception of refugees and even reconstruction of social life in general. These initiatives then benefit from a great legitimacy because they become vital in these circumstances and are more efficient than international aid. The subjective factor is decisive for such opportunities to materialize. This perspective is an integral part of our ecosocialist strategy as a revolutionary strategy. More generally, the capitalist impotence persisting in the face of the development of the ecological crisis contributes to creating an objectively favorable situation, either to barbarism or to revolution.

3.10. Localization, decentralization and internationalism

3.10.1. In the ecosocialist emergency plan, the requirements of localization of production and food sovereignty are part of a self-management and internationalist perspective that is radically opposed to both capitalist globalization and free trade on the one hand, and to capitalist protectionism and national sovereignty, on the other hand. In developed countries in particular, the greatest vigilance is required in the face of far right recovery attempts. The far right tries to shift ecological demands towards nationalist pseudo-responses that are always at the service of capital and bridge the racist, islamophobic and reactionary-traditionalist themes in general. The issues of localization of production and food sovereignty are among the most frequent areas of these attempts. It is therefore crucial to frame these requests carefully, to avoid any recovery (“récuperation” in French is not equal to recovery, don’t know the ENGL equivalent).

3.10.2. We oppose the relocation of companies to low-cost countries, and are in favor of localization of production in general, but do not support the demand for relocation in imperialist countries of companies that have moved towards low-cost countries. This idea would entail that workers in low-cost countries should lose their jobs so that those in the imperialist countries will regain their own. Instead of uniting the workers of different countries against their exploiters, this demand puts them in competition, and therefore disarms them in the face of the pressure of employers for competitiveness on the markets. The location of production is part of an entirely different project, based on ecological and social needs, in particular the right to employment and income for all, close to their place of life. Similarly, food sovereignty, for us, is not a national sovereignty, but a sovereignty at the level of territories defined as geophysical entities, regardless of the borders of states. This food sovereignty is not part of the nationalistic tendency to close borders, but rather of an internationalist tendency to abolish them, in order to leave the field open to the networking of self-managed territories, their exchanges and centralization at the level of larger geographic regions. This networking is indispensable not only for economic and social reasons, but also for ecological reasons such as the need for integrated management at the level of river basins, for example.

3.10.3. In general, the various formulas of “Left-wing Protectionism” support the idea that competition from low-wage countries that do not protect the environment are the decisive cause of industrial losses in developed countries. Yet the main cause of these job losses is the increase in labor productivity in a context where the historical movement to reduce working hours is blocked by the deterioration of the balance of power. By adopting the obsolete vision of a global economy based on competition among countries, while the dominant role today is played by multinationals, “left-wing protectionists” divert attention from the capital-labor contradiction to an interclass front in defense of competitiveness. “Left-wing protectionism” pretends being internationalist, but it is silent on the destructive competition of low-cost agribusiness exports from developed countries to the South and other manifestations of imperialist domination. The danger of racist contamination from sovereignist positions is significant. Indeed, in the more developed countries, the defense of employment by safeguarding the competitiveness of firms against the competition of low-wage countries can easily transform in the defense of employment by combating illegal or foreign workers’ competition, since the latter represent, so to speak, “a third world at home”. It is precisely in this deadly trap that the extreme right wants to attract the labor movement and the environmental movement.

3.10.4. Faced with an ecosocialist government that would effectively begin to break with capitalism on base of the mobilization of the exploited and the oppressed, we would of course defend the right of this government to protect its policy by measures such as the monopoly of foreign trade, control of capital movements and so on. But this does not mean protecting capitalist companies from international competition. On the opposite, it is a matter of protecting the anti-capitalist policy while calling on the exploited and oppressed of other countries to join the fight for and spread it to other countries, in the internationalist perspective of the overthrow of world capitalism. Such a policy is at the very opposite of “protectionism”, which always amounts to subordinating ecological and social demands to the needs of strengthening national capitalism on the world market, that is to say, ultimately, to free trade.

3.10.5. Ecosocialism can begin at the national level but can only be achieved at the world scale, for the rational and prudent management of the Earth System asks global democratic planning. The global scientific work realized by bodies like the IPCC, the IGBP and others shows this global democratic planning is possible. What scientists can do at their level could be done by democratically elected representatives of the social movements, too, and is partly done today by organizations like Via Campesina and other unions.

4. Ideological Fights

4.1. Ecosocialism as an ethical struggle and a project of civilization

4.1.1. We opt for a radically anti-capitalist, humanist, internationalist, feminist and self-managed ecosocialism based on a triple finding that determines its content:

 the need for an anti-capitalist transitional program to be developed with due regard for ecological constraints to respect from now on, without referring them to the post-capitalist period;

 the impossibility of carrying out this program as a whole other than through the direct, revolutionary, democratic and self-organized convergent action of the exploited and oppressed: workers, women, LGBT people, youth, peasants and indigenous peoples;

 the profound crisis of meaning and values arising from the inversion between needs and production, between living and dead labor, between living and inert: capital alienates the human being from its nature as a thinking animal, consciously and collectively producing its social existence.

4.1.2. Ecosocialism for us is not only a strategy of struggle and a program: it is also an ethical fight. “Nature” is the inorganic body of humanity, destruction of the environment is our destruction and that of our children. As a result, the ecological crisis is much more than a crisis in the functioning of ecosystems due to the logic of profit: it is a global crisis of human civilization. To put an end to it is a necessary condition to abolish market production and to substitute a society based on the use value defined by the satisfaction of the real, democratically determined human needs. But this necessary condition is by no means a sufficient condition. First, because ecological destruction, like the oppression of women, existed before capitalism, albeit in a different way. Secondly, and especially because “truly existing socialism” has developed a specific form of “bureaucratic productivism” that has been as destructive of the environment as capitalist productivism.

4.1.3. This balance of the USSR, China and the Eastern European countries cannot be attributed exclusively to the bureaucratic Stalinist degeneration of the revolution. On the ideological level, it was facilitated in part by the impregnation of the revolutionary movement by the mechanistic scientist conceptions developed by the bourgeoisie. These conceptions, which must be analyzed in their historical context, have determined a vision of the environment as a matter to be dominated and shaped without limit according to the will. These conceptions were present in most of the tendencies of the workers’ movement, including among the left-wing opponents to Stalinism, especially Trotsky.

4.1.4. Just as the emancipation of women requires an autonomous movement and the construction of a socialist tendency within it, the end of ecological destruction requires the construction of an ecosocialist current intervening, so to speak, in the name of nature, in a an anti-capitalist, internationalist and anti-bureaucratic perspective. It is a question of developing step by step a new ecological consciousness, a new cosmogony, a new culture carrying values of respect, care and prudence. Humanity has caused a lot of ecological destruction, but there is no reason to think that human intelligence and sensitivity cannot allow us to re-learn what mechanistic conceptions of nature have made us forget, to rebuild what can be and to invent, in doing so, a new culture of our relationship with the rest of nature.

4.1.5. We do not claim any monopoly on ecosocialism. We are open to collaboration with all the other currents of the concept, and debate with them primarily on the basis of the relevance and coherence of the answers they propose to unite social and ecological struggles.

4.2. Marx’s Ecology: source of inspiration, work in progress

4.2.1. We rely on Marx’s critical analysis, especially the following ideas that directly concern the humanity-nature relationship and the criticism of this relationship under capitalism:

 Nature and labor are the only sources of all wealth; nature is the principal source of use values;

 Capitalism presupposes the separation between producers and natural resources, the appropriation of resources by capital, the purchase of labor power against wages and the constantly enlarged reproduction of this movement of expropriation /alienation;

 the race for surplus value is constantly urging capital to plunder natural, mineral and organic resources – notably the tendency towards a fishing industry destroying fishery resources and the tendency towards an increasingly intensive agricultural industry which exhaust soil, practices monoculture and favors meat production;

 the only rational agriculture is that which is based on the independent peasants or on the collective ownership of the soil (exact citation). The only rational forestry is that which escapes the race for profit;

 Capital is a social relation of exploitation of labor fed by inputs in natural resources and aimed at the production of surplus value. The only limit of capital is capital itself;

 The production of surplus value necessarily involves the breakdown of the metabolism between humanity and the rest of nature. Capitalist accumulation exhausts both the Earth and the laborer, whose labor power is also a natural resource. Stopping the plundering of resources (the rational management of the relationship between society and nature) requires the abolition of the exploitation of the labor force and the reduction of working time.

4.2.2. Despite the richness of these contributions, Marx and Engels” work is marked to a certain extent by scientism and by the illusions of progress stemming from “the unlimited growth of the productive forces”. Otherwise, their thinking must be scrutinized by (eco) feminist analyzes of patriarchy.

Marx’s formula that capital exhausts the only two sources of all wealth, land and the laborer, gains to be developed in order to explicitly integrate agricultural labor and reproductive labor: by the logic of its development, capital tends to Increase the exploitation of wage labor, the patriarchal oppression of women (who freely assume most of the reproductive care within the family), the destruction of the environment and the ruin of small peasants. This dynamic vision founds the historical necessity of the convergence of workers ’, peasants’, feminist, youth and ecological struggles.

Marx’s idea that the human labor force is a resource not only social (generated by the forms of cooperation) but also natural underpins its assertion that the private appropriation of the Earth will appear one day as barbaric as the private appropriation of one human being by another. But the implementation of the labor force is gendered and “in the family, man is the bourgeois, the woman the proletariat” (Engels). Consequently, the appropriation of women’s bodies, the domestic work they provide free of charge and their discrimination in the productive sphere constitute a specific form of appropriation of wealth by capitalism, which must be highlighted to complete the analysis of this mode of production. This form combines with the exploitation of wage labor and the plundering of resources – which in turn leads to the ruin of independent peasants and the destruction of indigenous communities.

4.2.3. Our ecosocialism integrates all these aspects. Women’s struggles are an integral part of, but not limited to, the class struggle because patriarchal oppression is one of the foundations of capitalism. Environmental struggles are an integral part of, but not limited to, the class struggle because the insatiable appetite of capital for the consumption of resources is the counterpart of its dependence on living labor which transforms these resources into value, on the one hand, and reproduces the labor force within the framework of the family, on the other hand. Ecosocialism is therefore not only an antiproductivist alliance of the social and the environmental, and therefore a socialist workers-peasant alliance: it is also integration of feminism in the social and in the environmental spheres, thus socialist eco-feminism. For us, the concept of ecosocialism is not only justified by the need (i) to differentiate itself from the bureaucratic productivism implemented by “real socialism” in the name of “the liberation of the productive forces,” (ii) To get rid of the “productivist slag” present in Marx and Engels, and even more so among most Marxists after Marx. The ecological crimes of the Stalinist bureaucracy, as well as its social crimes, are not attributable to Marxism. But “the ecology of Marx” is a work in progress. Our eco-socialism also aims to continue its construction and transcend its limits.

4.3. De-growth and ecosocialism

4.3.1. It is pure idealism to believe that a mode of production based on the appropriation of the body of women and on the exploitation of the human labor force as a natural resource could generate in the majority of the population a social conscience respectful of natural resources and nature in general. In a system of generalized commodity production, that is, of generalized “chosification”, the dominant ideology towards “nature” is necessarily the market ideology, which considers the environment as a reservoir of free resources. Ecological struggle must bind itself to economic and feminist struggles to give birth to the social force of transformation of the existing order. The issues of labor, production, reproduction and development are therefore central to our ecosocialism. The nature of Homo sapiens is to produce socially its existence through work, which is an inescapable relation between humanity and nature. Each generation is lifted on the shoulders of the previous generation, so that development is consubstantial to the species. But human nature exists concretely only through its historical forms. The answer to the ecological crisis is not to “get out of work”, “to get out of development”, “to get out of consumption”, to “get out of growth”, etc., which are ahistorical abstractions. It consists in getting out from the abstract labor producing value, and thus from the capitalist mode of development oriented towards the growth of the GDP, and the mode of distribution / consumption / reproduction which results from it.

4.3.2. An overall degrowth in physical production and transport is essential to the ecological transition. But “degrowth” is not a program because the overall need for “degrowth” in general does not solve anything: there are sectors to be abolished, others to be reduced, others to be developed, taking into account levels of development. The calls to “decolonize the imaginary” remain hollow formulas as long as there is no concrete indication of how the reduction of global material production can be articulated with satisfaction of the mass of dissatisfied social needs, what sectors must grow, how investments are directed towards these sectors, how employment will be guaranteed (or not), respecting the “ceiling” of environmental constraints, especially climate. Nor does degrowth constitute a project of society, for it says nothing of the production and property relationships.

4.4. Ecosocialism and “true nature”

4.4.1. We reject the different variants of the idea that “nature” suffers from humanity as a disease. Humanity is part of nature that it transforms. The mode of this transformation is not “natural” for all that (as was the case in geological history because of other species). It is historically determined by the social relations of production. The carrying capacity of our species is thus historically and socially determined. Any progress in general is not “inherently” ecologically regressive. The capitalist mode of production produces before our eyes and more and more quickly a transformed and impoverished nature. This “destructive progress” does not threaten “the planet” nor “life on Earth” in general: even without oxygen, bacteria would remain, as at the beginning of life on this planet. On the other hand, it is destroying thousands of forms of life, threatening the lives of hundreds of millions of people, threatening humanity’s shift into barbarism, and, eventually, possibly threaten the human species as a whole.

4.4.2. The vision of “true nature” as nature without the human being is anhistoric and misanthropic. It brings no real solution, since this “true nature”, virgin, exists nowhere on the surface of the globe. Faced with this impasse, the cosmogony of the indigenous peoples (Mother Earth) is a source of inspiration for another conception of humanity-nature relations, a conception freed of value monomania, instrumental rationality and the icy waters of selfish calculation. But it is a source of inspiration, not an export product. A communist society, without class, will resemble in some respects the so-called “primitive” societies, but will be quite different, given the level of development of the productive forces. In the same way, this society will develop a conception of human-nature relations which, probably, will resemble in some respects that of indigenous peoples, but will nevertheless be different. A conception in which the ethical notions of precaution, respect and responsibility, as well as the wonder at the beauty of the world, will be nourished permanently, not by a magical apprehension but by a scientific apprehension more and more precise while being at the same time more and more clearly incomplete.

4.5. Religion and ecological crisis.

The Encyclical Laudato Si! Its importance, its weaknesses and the origin of these. The issue of women’s rights as the major contradiction of this text, key to our ecosocialist critic.

5. Conclusion: ecosocialism or barbarism

The warning of Rosa Luxemburg before the First World War and to draw a parallel with “the catastrophe that is coming”.