Focus on fossil capital, not degrowth: A critique of ‘Manifesto for an Ecosocialist Revolution’
After decades of effort, the global environmental movement has not reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, fossil capitalists have marshalled their class power to defeat alternatives and burn fossil fuels at a growing rate.
They are winning a global class war against working people, farmers, poor and indigenous peoples who suffer the worst from global warming and ecological collapse. Gradual reform and Green New Deals have failed. Only class struggle and ecosocialist revolution can slow global warming.
The Manifesto for an Ecosocialist Revolution — Break with Capitalist Growth was overwhelmingly adopted by the 2025 Congress of the Fourth International as “an anticapitalist transitional program”. Like Leon Trotsky’s Transitional Program of 1938, the Manifesto seeks to be a
bridge between present demands and the socialist programme of the revolution. It aspires to be a system of transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class; the aim being to lead social struggles towards the conquest of power by the proletariat.
Unlike Trotsky’s Transitional Program, the Manifesto uses the concept of “economic degrowth”. Marxist degrowth is a theoretical framework that some seek to apply to environmental struggles, while others do not.
Marxist degrowth starts with Karl Marx’s observation that a capitalist enterprise requires continual growth in the surplus between a commodity’s production costs and sale price. Continual growth requires never-ending increases in raw-material inputs and toxic outputs.
Among other results, degrowth teaches that we cannot produce our way out of global warming and ecological destruction. The Manifesto presents a vision of a world based on this concept.
The Manifesto’s vision
The Manifesto authors write
... imagine what a good life would be for everyone, everywhere, while reducing the consumption of matter and energy, taking into account differentiated responsibilities, and therefore reducing material production. It is not a question of giving a ready-made model, but of daring to think of another world, a world that makes us want to fight to build it by breaking with capitalism and productivism.
This vision is one of plenty for all in a socialist world of production strictly for human need; one that protects natural resources and ensures social justice.
Planned economies in the Soviet Union and China, however, produced mass famines and destroyed what was once the world’s largest inland sea. Socialists can only prove that replacing capitalism is a necessary condition to stop environmental destruction. We cannot prove that a socialist revolution is sufficient for meeting our ecological and social-justice goals, among others, today and in the future.
The Manifesto assumes too much about a future, post-capitalist world. And it decides too much for the future self-emancipated working classes. Rather than a program of struggle, the Manifesto presents a policy platform on topics such as nuclear power, open borders, reducing the wealthy’s purchasing power and ending fast fashion. This enumeration obscures those demands that are truly transitional and crucial to struggle.
The Manifesto’s transitional demands
For example, the Manifesto’s ecosocialism
... raises the flag of extending rights and freedoms: right of association, of demonstration, right to strike; free election of parliamentary bodies in a multi-party system; a ban on private financing of political parties; legalization of popular initiative referendums; abolition of non-democratic institutions (such as an autonomous Central Bank); prohibition of private ownership of major means of communication; abolition of censorship; a fight against corruption; dissolution of militias serving leaders; respect for the rights and territories of indigenous communities and other oppressed peoples, etc.
Certain demands in this list are qualitatively different from others. Indigenous rights are different because they are based on self-determination or autonomy.
Freedom of speech and assembly are different because they are fundamental to winning all other freedoms. Workers won civil rights in bourgeois democratic revolutions starting in the 19th century and through major class struggles in the 20th century.
But in times of capitalist crisis, governments quickly revoke freedom of speech, assembly, association and even thought. This forces working people to continually defend our right to organise publicly.
Secret versus public operation was the first disagreement among US Communists in the 1920s. The early Comintern taught them that a socialist revolution depends on working-class development, and that this requires free speech and assembly for organisation, education, economic actions and mass political activity.
The Manifesto mixes transitional demands with a platform of political policies. There is an overwhelming number of demands, alternatives and policies. This is partly due to the Manifesto’s method of uniting demands from the “ecosocialist, antiracist, antimilitarist, anti-imperialist, anticolonialist and feminist” movements rather than finding their points of intersection.
The struggle for democratic rights is common to all social movements. So is the struggle against global warming.
Global warming
The Manifesto calls to “socialize energy and finance without compensation or buyback to get out of fossil fuels and nuclear power as quickly as possible.” This demand is one of about twenty under the section “Main lines of an ecosocialist alternative to capitalist growth.” One of these “ecosocialist alternatives” is qualitatively different from the others.
Socialise energy addresses global warming, which is arguably world capitalism’s greatest contradiction today. Global warming shows that capitalism can do nothing else but produce its way to destroying the planet for our species and others.
The total value of capital that would be lost from leaving oil and gas reserves in the ground exceeds the value of the human beings freed by the Emancipation Proclamation during the US Civil War. The capital loss would also exceed the total value of capital expropriated by the Russian Revolution, which resulted in a devastating civil war.1
But today, for fossil-capital investors and bankers to survive, the working classes must pay hundreds of billions of dollars every year to recover from climate-induced disasters and invest in climate upgrades to utilities, transportation and communication infrastructure. The transitional demand to “socialize oil and gas,” therefore, demands that fossil-fuel companies pay for the damage they cause.
Oil and gas companies have taken their nations to war, killed millions of people, overthrown governments, and will certainly seek to destroy any movement demanding the expropriation of their surplus. And yet, this is the only way to reduce greenhouse gases: stopping their growth means expropriating fossil capital.
Regardless of how one feels about nuclear power, it is fossil fuels that directly cause global warming. The market capitalisation of big oil alone is an order of magnitude larger than that of the nuclear industry. All of this makes fossil capital a much better target than nuclear energy for an ecosocialist transitional program.
International nature of transitional demands against fossil capital
Today’s struggles against fossil capital are happening worldwide as un-coordinated local, regional, national and indigenous efforts to stop specific fossil-fuel projects. In the US Pacific Northwest, for example, local and regional movements have stopped most investments in coal, coal gas, LNG and oil terminal ports for fossil fuels trans-shipment to Asia.
These local and regional efforts are fighting the most powerful global corporations. To counter such power, we must build worldwide opposition to fossil capital. This opposition would be specific to the locale, region or nation.
Socialists in the US, for example, could raise the transitional demand to expropriate fossil profits to offset the effects of greenhouse-gas emissions. That could lead to de-commodifying energy and set a precedent of forcing companies to pay the true costs of production. Its success would depend on how the general public, labour unions and other industry workers support producing a product for use rather than for profit.
‘Productivism’ and ‘consumerism’
The Manifesto claims that “satisfying real social needs while respecting ecological constraints is only possible by breaking with the productivist and consumerist logic of capitalism.” If there is such a thing as a “productivist break,” however, it is between people who study and apply Marxist analysis to ecology: it is between “productivist” versus “metabolic” interpretations of Marx’s work.
The Manifesto drags this scholarly debate by the hair into the arena of mass struggle. It sees a “productivist break” where others might see a struggle to defend water, assert indigenous land rights, stop LNG expansion or protect neighbourhood home prices.
Few argue to reduce overall productive activity. They do not need to: working people develop class consciousness from struggle against the capitalist class rather than debates over capitalist lifestyles. Concrete demands such as “take big oil profits” are better suited to mass struggle than abstract ones like “break with productivism.”
Likewise, the call to “break with consumerism” is not a class-struggle demand. Simon Pirani2 notes
...that it is social, economic and technological systems that consume resources, that individuals do so through those systems and that there is no direct, arithmetic correlation between their consumption and environmental impacts.
Instead of institutions, however, the Manifesto focuses on individual consumers:
First steps include drastically reducing the purchasing power of the rich, abandoning fast fashion, advertisement and luxury production/consumption (cruises, yachts and private jets or helicopters, space tourism, etc.), scaling down mass-produced meat and dairy and ending the accelerated obsolescence of products, extending their lifespan and facilitating their repair.
Rather than telling working people what socialists want to take from them, we should present a strategy to empower working people to decide these questions rather than billionaires.
‘Degrowth’
Working people generally understand that they need to produce things to get paid and that they must buy commodities to at least survive. When workers cannot get paid or buy basic commodities, it is because the economy has stopped growing.
Molyneux writes:
Degrowth under capitalism is a disaster for working class people. It means, in reality, a recession with all the unemployment and suffering that involves. This ‘difficulty’ cannot be evaded by saying what we want is ‘democratically planned degrowth’ or some such. Planned degrowth under capitalism, with the capitalist class still in power, is impossible. And even small steps towards degrowth will hit working class people, however we dress it up.
The Manifesto puts the cart before the horse. It commences a struggle against capitalist lifestyles before winning the struggle against the capitalist system that breeds those lifestyles.
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