Friday, April 17, 2026

 

Three principles of ecosocialist politics


By Kai Heron
Published 

ecosocialism graphic rupture

First published at Rupture.

Cast your memory back to September 2019. Six million people took action globally in a week-long wave of climate protests. From Angola, to Cuba, Germany, India, Nigeria, Pakistan and even Antarctica, people walked out of school or work and took to streets and squares. I was one of them. On a clear autumnal day, our hundreds-strong contingent of workers and students marched from Manchester’s Oxford Road to join thousands more in St. Peter’s Square, the site of the Peterloo Massacre and now a sanitized city plaza. From there, we marched into the streets of Manchester’s gentrified areas of the Northern Quarter and Ancoats, once described by Engel’s as ‘hell on earth’.1

Our route, pre-agreed by the event’s organisers and Manchester’s police, was not meant to be a tour of Manchester’s radical past. Instead, it led us across rather than along Manchester’s major throughways and eventually into a parking lot ringfenced for private development into luxury apartments. We were marching, in other words, into a holding pen. As we drew near, plans started to form about refusing to enter the car park. Why not hold up traffic for a little longer? Why not risk arrest and make a real show of force? Others disagreed. We were making a show by marching through Manchester. More disruption would only irritate the road-using public and cause issues for the event’s organisers. Agreement was impossible. Some blocked the roads. Some walked into the parking lot to hear rousing talks from guest speakers. Many more dispersed, the energy of the moment lost, and in hindsight, never to return.

A few short months later, Covid-19 forced Britain and much of the world to go into lockdown. As politically and strategically confused as our event was, it turned out to have been a nodal point on a day that arguably marked the apex of the global climate movement. Six years later, it is clear that this kind of climate struggle — one over the climate in the abstract, one that asks the state to act on our behalf — is dead. It is equally clear that this is no bad thing. Much of the climate movement’s energy rightly swung into solidarity actions with Palestine as it suffered the full force of Zionist incursion and genocide. This struggle has radicalised generations of organisers, forcing connections to be drawn between capitalism, imperialism, racism and ecology in ways that no film, book, or lecture ever could.

Once these lessons have been learned, environmental politics in the imperial core can never be the same again. It must be bolder, more savvy about state repression, and more dialled into the lived experience of climate breakdown both at home in the imperial core and in the global peripheries. And it must be single-mindedly focused on the shared drivers of climate breakdown and the Zionist genocide: the capitalist world-system itself. Climate politics, in other words, must be ecosocialist.

The shape, form, and guiding principles of this renewed Ecosocialism are only now emerging in conversations among climate organisers, anti-capitalists and anti-imperialists. Ultimately, they will be determined in the struggles to come. Here, however, I present three that I believe are as self-evident as they are indispensable.

1. Ecosocialism is a revolutionary politics, so act as if the revolution has already begun

The human and non-human world is beset by a cascading series of social, economic, and ecological crises that require urgent and radical intervention. For decades, climate scientists have been sounding the alarm about how serious things have become, to no avail. Last year, the Guardian newspaper interviewed 380 leading climate scientists and asked them how they felt about the future.2 The Mexican scientist Ruth Cerezo-Mota answered in this way: “Sometimes it is almost impossible not to feel hopeless and broken. After all the flooding, fires, and droughts of the last three years worldwide, all related to climate change, and after the fury of Hurricane Otis in Mexico, my country, I really thought that governments were ready to listen to the science, to act in the people’s best interest.”

This is a common way of thinking among the climate science community. It is a fanciful way of thinking. The idea that governments will ‘listen to the science’ — a slogan that is incidentally used by Extinction Rebellion and that was used by the younger, more naïve Greta Thunberg — assumes that politics is conducted in the realm of ideas. It assumes that if we can just accumulate enough evidence, and if we can speak that evidence loudly enough to power, then it will act and it will act in the way that we want it to.

The belief that world leaders will ‘listen to the science’ is fanciful, not because world leaders don’t listen but because they are listening and what they’re doing in response is not only insufficient but harmful. With the exception of the Trump administration, the imperial core is acting on the climate crisis, and its answer is more market-based solutions and militarisation. It doesn’t matter how refined our climate models become, how precisely we can predict when and where the next disaster will hit, how many people we can bring into the streets to ask nicely for swift action. No amount of granular evidence, and no amount of forceful argumentation, will make them change their course.

Cerezo-Mota also repeats another common idea: if the crisis gets bad enough, then surely the public will wake up and act. She mentions Hurricane Otis. Otis was the first hurricane to ever make landfall at intensity 5. At 1:45 am local time on the 25th of October 2023, Otis slammed into Mexico’s coastal city of Acapulco at around 165 miles an hour, ripping apart houses, tossing cars, and cutting out power and drinking water. Heavy rains caused floods and landslides that tore up the region’s coastlines, mountains, and riverbanks. Not only was Otis the most destructive hurricane in Mexico’s history, but it has increased the region’s long-term vulnerability to wildfires, floods, and landslides. But outside of the region affected, who remembers Hurricane Otis? Who hears mention of it among the world’s politicians? Or, more recently and closer to home, who hears much talk about how the heatwave that hit Europe at the end of June this year killed 2,300 people across 12 major cities?

Unfortunately, the idea that if things get bad enough, then people will act is misguided. After Covid-19, we know that even a worldwide crisis won’t necessarily make people act in ways we might like them to. COVID is an important example because it is as much a continuing global health crisis as it was an ecological crisis unleashed by capital’s drive towards urbanisation and its correlated destruction of forest habitats. Again, the mistake is to think that people aren’t acting. The uncomfortable truth is that everyone, right now, is acting just how they would act if we were in the midst of not one but several world-historical emergencies. The climate crisis, ecological collapse, genocide, and the construction of a profoundly racist proto-fascistic post-liberal order in the imperial core.

People are acting how they do — which by and large is by getting on with their normal lives — not because they don’t care. Many care deeply. So deeply, in fact, that they can’t stand to look at the images coming out of Palestine or to think too hard about the world we are passing onto future generations. The problem is that most of us, and especially working class people who must be at the forefront of a revolutionary politics, don’t have channels of action available to us that empower us to act differently. We are overburdened by work and by care commitments. Burned out and in need of a rest that never arrives because no sooner do we get on top of things than we are hit by the next personal or global crisis.

This, I would wager, includes many socialists. Socialists know that it is only through careful social and economic planning that we can heal the human and non-human worlds that have been degraded, exploited, and destroyed by capital for over 500 years. And that it is only by abandoning the idea of ‘national security’ in favour of genuine internationalism that we can act at the scale required to meet what is a planetary crisis. We also know that none of this is possible through reform. It requires a communist revolution. But who has time for that? Who has the capacity to organise more than they already do?

From an ecosocialist perspective, this is a false line of questioning. Ecosocialism is not a subjectivist politics. It does not say that the goal is to make everyone a card-carrying ecosocialist, as nice as this might be. It does not say that the revolution will take place on a specific date in the distant future. Instead, ecosocialism recognises that in some sense the revolution has already begun in the form of global working class and peasant struggles to wrest ourselves away from capital’s stranglehold on our collective reproduction, so that we can live freely and flourish together. People are fighting because they must.

This already active revolutionary force, this real movement that might abolish the present state of things, will only pick up speed and avoid defeat if those of us who are card-carrying ecosocialists can shake off the cynicism that sometimes enters our ranks, and if we can pitch our political strategies at the right level for the current conditions of struggle and levels of class consciousness.

This is important because for the revolution to succeed, it must be a popular revolution, which means that it must appeal to and empower the vast majority. The masses must be able to look at images of the latest hurricane making landfall thousands of miles away or the latest Palestinian body smeared across the rubble of their family home by a GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb and know that there is something they can do about it. And, crucially, it must draw in those segments of the working class tempted by the false reactionary solutions to the world’s problems spouted by the far far-right. Which brings us to the second principle of ecosocialism.

2. Never separate environmentalism from social issues

What do you think of when you hear the word ‘environment’? Perhaps a green landscape filled with trees, fields, and wildlife. Perhaps an ocean. Most people don’t think of city centres, suburbs, housing estates, sewers, airports, and shipyards.

In the 1970s, the Black Radical Nathan Hare penned a brief essay called ‘Black Ecology’.3 In it, he made a distinction between what he called white ecology and black ecology. White ecology meant idyllic vistas of trees, fields, and frolicking wildlife. A landscape strangely devoid of people. Black ecology meant the urban ghetto. A geography choked with people forced into inhospitable conditions by profiteering landlords, formal and informal racial segregation, and gentrification. Black ecology is the house infested withants. It’s the mould colonising people’s lungs, choking them of air because of damp issues landlords refuse to treat. It’s the child born with learning difficulties because of high atmospheric levels of nitrogen oxide in dense urban environments.

Hare’s point was that the ‘environmental movement’ that had blossomed after the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 had made the mistake of separating environmentalism from where people live, work, and die. It had cleaved environmental issues away from power, race, gender, and class.

Hare’s criticisms are worth repeating because parts of the environmental movement, and indeed some ecosocialists, have still not learned the lessons he hoped to teach. Environmentalism isn’t a discrete ‘issue’ to be added to a long list of discrete ‘issues’ we fight for. Justice is not mathematics. We don’t reach it by adding climate justice to anti-racist justice, to feminist justice, to disability justice, and so on. Instead, we must recognise that ecological questions are already a part of every single struggle.

Sometimes this is obvious. Fighting to retrofit old housing stock, for example, is good for the environment because it reduces the amount of energy we need to heat our homes, and it’s good for workers because using less energy means bills are cheaper. But the connections aren’t always so clear. Ecosocialism is a politics that is adept not only at saying that every class struggle is an ecological struggle, and every anti-racist struggle an ecological struggle. It is a politics highly skilled in integrating these elements into one struggle in a compelling and popular fashion.

Today this skill is more important to develop than ever. The right has unfortunately constructed an extremely dangerous form of fossil fuel populism based on the idea that environmental issues are too expensive. The imperial core’s workers, they argue, are being asked to foot the bill for an energy transition that they can’t possibly afford, and all because of sensationalism around how severe the climate crisis is. This story has been so successful that large parts of the public in Europe have fully absorbed it. A recent study, for example, found that the British public overestimate the cost of Net Zero by a shocking 14,000%.4

An ecosocialist politics doesn’t try to educate the public about the true costs of net zero. In part because netzero exists to permit further fossil fuel combustion and not to decarbonise the global economy, but mainly because an ecosocialist politics knows that you don’t move people with arguments, you move them by proving in practice that an ecosocialist present and future means a better quality of life for them and their loved ones.

As Amilcar Cabral says, ‘always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children’.5

3. Anti-imperialism is not an optional extra

It wasn’t that long ago that talk of imperialism among the West’s left was the narrow pursuit of traditional Marxist groups influenced by Lenin. Today, in the wake of Israel and its US and European ally’s ongoing genocide in Palestine, the word imperialism is on everyone’s lips. And yet it’s fair to say that there isn’t strong agreement about what imperialism is. Is it the foreign policy of the US, its allies, and regional proxies? Is it when extra-economic violence is used against a people? Is it evidenced by value drains from the periphery of the world-system to the core? Is Russia imperialist? Is China?

From these disagreements it follows that there is disagreement about what it means to fight against imperialism. The fight to end the genocide in Gaza is obvious, but it is also obvious that this won’t end imperialism. If our anti-imperialism is to mean something more than solidarity with Palestine — and it must — then an ecosocialist politics today must become much clearer on what an anti-imperialist politics involves and what it asks of us as individuals and collectives based in the imperial core.

In Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism Lenin warned that many Marxists were ‘internationalist in words, and social chauvinist in deed’.6 He was referring to the decision among European communist parties to support war credits for their bourgeoise governments. Today, ecosocialism must grasp that many are still internationalist and anti-imperialist in words and social chauvinist in deed, but in more subtle ways.

Building trade unions in the core to manufacture green products that will be sold to the global south for a profit, or which they can only access through the purchase of loans granted by Western banks and international organizations, is imperialist. Rewilding parts of our landscapes to meet carbon targets, which studies show offset ecological destruction and emissions to the Global South, is imperialist.7 Suggesting that we don’t need to reduce our overall energy and material consumption in the imperial core as part of a transition towards an ecosocialist future is imperialist. Critiquing the so-called ‘extractivist’ project of development in states like Venezuela, or questioning the democratic credentials of sanctioned countries like Cuba, is imperialist. These things are imperialist because they are social chauvinist. Unfortunately, social chauvinism is all too common among some so-called socialists and among environmentalists in the imperial core.

All of this stands as confirmation of what Lenin said internationalism must mean for those in the imperial core:

internationalism on the part of oppressors or ‘great’ nations, as they are called (though they are great only in their violence, only great as bullies), must consist not only in the observance of the formal equality of nations but even in an inequality of the oppressor nation, the great nation, that must make up for the inequality which obtains in actual practice.8

What does this mean today? To make up for the inequality that exists in practice means to dismantle the apparatus of imperialism at home, which is an apparatus that differentially exploits both us and those in the periphery. Imperialism is the form that global capitalism takes today, and capitalism is an impediment to our collective flourishing. It is what stops us having more free time, better working conditions, more biodiverse landscapes, good quality nutrient dense food, and so much else besides.

‘The main enemy’, as Karl Liebknecht said, ‘is at home.’9 Ecosocialism must grasp this intuitively and act on it, resisting imperialist foreign policy, disrupting weapons manufacturing, breaking apart chauvinistic trade unions, materially assisting anti-imperialist forces internationally, and materially supporting movements for popular development in the Global South, because our lives, and the lives of workers everywhere, depend on it.

This essay is a lightly edited version of a talk Kai Heron gave at the RISE Summer Camp in August 2025. Kai Heron is a Lecturer in Political Ecology at Lancaster University. He is the co-author with Keir Milburn and Bertie Russell of Radical Abundance: How to Win a Green Democratic Future (Pluto Press, 2025)



Capitalism is the problem. Ecosocialism is the solution.

By Harry Fairless
Published 
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smoke furnace

At one point in the 1977 novel, Ceremony, by Native American author and storyteller Leslie Marmon Silko of the Laguna Pueblo people, the narrator, focalised through the perspective and voice of the protagonist Tayo (a Laguna Pueblo man), states:

The [Native American] people had been taught to despise themselves because they were left with barren lands and dry rivers. But they were wrong. It was the white people who had nothing; it was the white people who were suffering as thieves do, never able to forget that their pride was wrapped in something stolen, something that had never been, and could never be, theirs. The destroyers had tricked the white people as completely as they had fooled the Indians, and now only a few people understood how the filthy deception worked; only a few people knew that the lie was destroying the white people faster than it was destroying Indian people. But the effects were hidden, evident only in the sterility of their art, which continued to feed off the vitality of other cultures, and in the dissolution of their consciousness into dead objects: the plastic and neon, the concrete and steel. Hollow and lifeless as a witchery clay figure. And what little still remained to white people was shriveled like a seed hoarded too long, shrunken past its time, and split open now, to expose a fragile, pale leaf stem, perfectly formed and dead. (Ceremony, 189-90)

This passage powerfully captures the destructive and alienating effects of capitalist society, particularly within a settler-colonial context. It suggests that capitalism and ecological damage are intimately tethered. The narrator laments the “barren lands and dry rivers” that the “destroyers” — the rulers and the dominant class — have caused with their rapacious ideology and actions.

And it is not just the Indigenous peoples of the land who suffer the consequences, but also white settlers and their descendants. The narrator tells us that the deleterious impacts of such a system on white people are evident, in part, in “the dissolution of their consciousness into dead objects: the plastic and neon, the concrete and steel”.

Alienation

This description resonates with Karl Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism. In Volume 1 of Capital, Marx writes,

the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour, within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation, between men, themselves, which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations, both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is, therefore, inseparable from the production of commodities. (Capital, Volume 1, 165)

A curious feature of capitalism is that it masks the social nature of its form of production, making it appear as if the commodities produced by “the aggregate labour of society” were actually produced “naturally”, autonomously, of their “own accord”, especially when they are encountered as finished products in the market to be bought and consumed (Capital, Volume 1, 165). In other words, the reality of the complex processes of capitalist production that go into making a commodity (with its sophisticated supply chains, divisions of labour, etc) are hidden or reified in the commodity that comes out at the end of the production process.

An implication of commodity fetishism is that instead of having agency over the things we produce, the things we produce dominate us; we become subordinated to the primacy of exchange value, profit and the commodities that are made and sold to realise these things. We are presented with a topsy-turvy situation in which there is an inversion between subject and object. It is as if we hand over our active subjectivity, willpower and productive capacities to the commodities we create in exchange for the commodity’s passive objectivity, which we internalise. In short, humans become the object while the commodity becomes the subject.

The quote from Ceremony about the dissolution of people’s “consciousness into dead objects” echoes Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism. Silko’s novel implies a connection between this sort of alienation and environmental devastation. The narrator mentions the “dead objects” (or commodities) of “plastic and neon”, “concrete and steel”. Marxists and socialists are, of course, not against industrialisation in general, but we can infer from Silko’s quote a reproach of the capitalist mode of production and its pollution, wastefulness and exploitation of nature (plastic and neon especially being common signifiers of these sorts of things).

The final sentence of the passage offers a rather telling simile:

And what little still remained to white people was shriveled like a seed hoarded too long, shrunken past its time, and split open now, to expose a fragile, pale leaf stem, perfectly formed and dead.

This image of a lifeless, calcified leaf stem — a symbol of biological nature/the ecosphere — represents the alienated condition of those in thrall to the power and logic of capital, even the white people who created this system. Indeed, in the context of capitalist society, the subjugation, exploitation and destruction of the natural world and the subjugation, exploitation, and destruction of human beings go hand-in-hand.

In their book Dialectic of Enlightenment, philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argue that within the framework of “Enlightenment” epistemology (whose cynical, instrumental “rationality” reaches its apogee in capitalist modernity), “[w]hat [humans] want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other [humans]. That is its only aim” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 4). They add a few pages later,

[m]yth turns into enlightenment, and nature into mere objectivity. [Humans] pay for the increase of their power with alienation from that over which they exercise their power. Enlightenment behaves towards things as a dictator towards [people]. (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 9)

Metabolic rift

The discussion of the alienating quality of capitalist society (in the forms of alienating labour and production, as well as alienation of society and individuals from nature) leads to another of Marx’s concepts, one that is directly relevant to ecology — the idea of the metabolic rift.

Marxist sociologist John Bellamy Foster contends that within the field of social science, “the most important critical insights this century have arguably emerged from ecosocialism” and that “[a]t the root of this critical understanding of the ecological problem is Marx’s famous theory of the metabolic rift, focusing on capitalism’s alienated social metabolism” (Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution, 26-7).

Foster writes in an earlier journal article,

The key to Marx’s entire theoretical approach in this area is the concept of social ecological metabolism (Stoffwechsel), which was rooted in his understanding of the labor process. Defining the labor process in general (as opposed to its historically specific manifestations), Marx employed the concept of metabolism to describe the human relation to nature through labor:

“Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature. . . . It [the labor process] is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction [Stoffwechsel] between man and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence...” (“Marx's Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology”, 380)

However, with the emergence of capitalism, a “rift” developed in the metabolic interactions between society and nature, because capitalism takes and takes and takes from nature without giving back or replenishing it. Foster elucidates this by drawing on volumes 1 and 3 of Marx’s Capital,

the central theoretical construct is that of a “rift” in the “metabolic interaction between man and the earth,” or in the “social metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life,” through the removal from the soil of its constituent elements, requiring its “systematic restoration.” This contradiction is associated with the growth simultaneously of large scale industry and large-scale agriculture under capitalism, with the former providing agriculture with the means of the intensive exploitation of the soil. (“Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift”, 379-80)

In Marx’s own words,

All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress toward ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility… Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the worker. (quoted in Foster, “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift”, 379)

As we are well aware today, such degradation of the soil is just one of many examples of the environmental crises and the metabolic rift that capitalism creates. There is also, as Foster points out, climate change,

ocean acidification, loss of biological diversity, the disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, disappearance of fresh water, land cover change (particularly deforestation), and growing pollution from synthetic chemicals (leading to biomagnification and bioaccumulation of toxins in living organisms) (Capitalism in the Anthropocene, 65).

Capitalism is the problem

Despite what liberals and capitalist ideologues argue (whether sincerely or disingenuously), capitalism does not have the capacity to adequately combat the ecological problems that it causes. It is an inherently unsustainable and wasteful system because it must always seek new avenues of profit generation and economic growth — otherwise it ceases functioning. The endless creation and accumulation of wealth for the sake of wealth is the essence of capitalism.

This requires the ever increasing exploitation of land and resources and the expanding proliferation of junk commodities that no one really needs, resulting in huge waste and pollution. As Marx says with such eloquent disdain in the Grundrisse,

workers, indeed, are productive, as far as they increase the capital of their master; unproductive as to the material result of their labour. In fact, of course, this ‘productive’ worker cares as much about the crappy shit he has to make as does the capitalist himself who employs him, and who also couldn’t give a damn for the junk (Grundrisse, 202).

This is because the use values of the products of labour are completely secondary to their exchange value in the wacky world of capitalism. In other words, things are made primarily to be sold in order to make money, regardless of how useful or necessary they are in themselves, and irrespective of the human and ecological consequences. Following Marx, others realised that the capitalist

system increasingly demanded, simply to keep going under conditions of chronic overaccumulation, the production of negative use values and the non-fulfillment of human needs. This entails the absolute alienation of the labor process, that is, the metabolic relations between human beings and nature, turning it primarily into a form of waste” (Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene, 58-9, emphasis in original).

We must therefore reject the notion that reforming capitalism or that technological advancements alone can solve the ecological disasters that beset us — indeed that are inflicted upon us and the world by capitalism. Of course, technology is essential to the metabolic relation of human beings to nature,

but technology as conditioned by both social relations and natural conditions. Contrary to those who argue that Marx wore an ecological blinder when it came to envisioning the limitations of technology in surmounting ecological problems, he explicitly argued in his critique of capitalist agriculture, that while capitalism served to promote “technical development in agriculture,” it also brought into being social relations that were “incompatible” with a sustainable agriculture... The solution thus lay less in the application of a given technology than in the transformation of social relations. (Foster, “Marx's Theory of Metabolic Rift”, 390)

Contrary to what the techno-utopians and other apologists for capitalism believe, what is needed is qualitative, revolutionary social transformation. However, to quote Foster again,

there is simply no indication anywhere in Marx’s writings that he believed that a sustainable relation to the earth would come automatically with the transition to socialism. Rather, he emphasized the need for planning in this area, including such measures as the elimination of the antagonism between town and country through the more even dispersal of the population ... and the restoration and improvement of the soil through the recycling of soil nutrients. All of this demanded a radical transformation in the human relation to the earth via changed production relations. (“Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift”, 386)

Ecosocialism is the solution

Although socialism will not be sufficient in and of itself, it is certainly necessary for a sustainable world. What is required, then, is not just socialism but ecosocialism. In the face of the multifaceted, compounding environmental catastrophe confronting humanity as a result of capitalism,

what is needed is a decades-long ecological revolution, in which an emergent humanity will once again, as it has innumerable times before, reinvent itself, transforming its existing relations of production and the entire realm of social existence, in order to generate a restored metabolism with nature and a whole new world of substantive equality as the key to sustainable human development. This is the peculiar “challenge and burden of our historical time.” (Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene, 125)

The aim is to build a system in which

socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their own collective control rather than being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature (Marx, quoted in Foster, “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift”, 382).

According to Foster, the emergence of an “environmental proletariat” is central to the struggle to overcome capitalism and construct ecosocialism. He claims we can

expect the most radical movements to emerge precisely where economic and ecological crises converge on the lives of the underlying population. Given the nature of capitalism and imperialism and the exigencies of the global environmental crisis, a new, revolutionary environmental proletariat is likely to arise most powerfully and most decisively in the Global South. Yet, such developments, it is now clear, will not be confined to any one part of the planet. (Capitalism in the Anthropocene, 124-5).

Those of us in the Global North/imperial core (of which so-called Australia is a member) bear the responsibility of putting our shoulders to the wheel and playing a part in the struggle of the international environmental proletariat, not least of all because of our disproportionate wastefulness, carbon footprint and overconsumption. 

These come at the expense of the Global South/periphery through the hyperexploitation of its labour power and resources, and because the poorest areas of the world are bearing, and will increasingly bear, the brunt of various ecological disasters that the Global North is primarily responsible for.

Foster rightly asserts, “In the dire conditions of the Anthropocene epoch, there is no answer for the human world that does not address the triple threats of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism” (Capitalism in the Anthropocene, 492). But the richer countries are not insulated from these crises either, so it is also in our own direct self-interest to fight for ecosocialism.

What humanity stands to achieve, among other things, is the overcoming of alienation both within society and between civilisation and nature. Social and technological advances, in conjunction, would enable us to come into a more harmonious relationship with the wider world around us, with which we are inextricably entwined, while also protecting human beings from the deadly whims of nature to an extent that no other social formation has hitherto been able to. 

In other words, and at the risk of sounding overly utopian, the human subject will be reconciled with the natural object. For the very first time in homo sapiens’ time on Earth, we will be truly free, in control of our collective destiny, and at home in the world.

In his monumental three-volume magnum opus, The Principle of Hope, Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, the theorist of hope and utopia par excellence, argues for the potential of reaching a historical condition in which the “naturalisation of man” and “the humanisation of nature” is attained through a reciprocal, dialectical process — an idea he borrows from Marx (The Principle of Hope, 205). Bloch’s concludes his book with the following sublime and inspiring words:

… man everywhere is still living in prehistory, indeed all and everything still stands before the creation of the world, of a right world. True genesis is not at the beginning but at the end, and it starts to begin only when society and existence become radical, i.e., grasp their roots. But the root of history is the working, creating human being who reshapes and overhauls the given facts. Once he has grasped himself and established what is his, without expropriation and alienation, in real democracy, there arises in the world something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been: homeland. (The Principle of Hope, 1375-6, emphasis in original)





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