Three Winners at the Latest DNC Meeting: Israel, Ethnic Cleansing, and Genocide

Why did pro-Israel groups voice so much pleasure and praise—not only for the sidelining of pro-human-rights resolutions but also for the process that sidelined them? Because, of course, the sidelining worked.


A medical worker rushes a child to the ambulance for treatment after Israeli airstrikes destroy buildings in Gaza City, Gaza on October 09, 2023.
(Photo by Belal Khaled/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Norman Solomon
Apr 16, 2026

Common Dreams

In the aftermath of last week’s big meeting of the Democratic National Committee in New Orleans, supporters of the US-Israel alliance have been quite content. “We’re pleased that the DNC Resolutions Committee rejected a set of divisive, anti-Israel resolutions,” the president of Democratic Majority for Israel said. The CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, a former national security advisor to Kamala Harris, expressed gratitude to the DNC’s leadership.

Why did pro-Israel groups voice so much pleasure and praise—not only for the sidelining of pro-human-rights resolutions but also for the process that sidelined them? The answer has to do with the DNC’s mechanism that thwarted changes in positions on Israel. A panel named the Middle East Working Group gummed up all efforts to align the DNC with the views of most Democratic voters, even while supposedly hard at work.

Last Friday, the transparent thinness of the pretense caused Politico to headline an article this way: “Inside the DNC’s Middle East (Not) Working Group.” But the not-working group had been functioning quite well—as a charade for delay and obfuscation.

The day before the derisive headline appeared, the DNC Resolutions Committee dispensed with a resolution about events in Gaza and the West Bank. Its provisions included a declaration that the DNC “supports pausing or conditioning US weapons transfers to any military units credibly implicated in violations of international humanitarian law or obstruction of humanitarian assistance.”

Given the crystal-clear polling, the failure of the Democratic Party leadership to oppose military aid to Israel threatens to seriously damage the turnout needed to defeat Republicans at election time.

That resolution critical of Israel went nowhere, which is to say it went to the so-called working group, also known as a “task force.”

Assisting the diversion as chair of the Resolutions Committee was political strategist Ron Harris, described in his home state of Minnesota as a “longtime Democratic Party insider.” He made false claims during the meeting: “I know that the task force has met once a month since it was created…. I have the confidence that work is happening…. These are people working really really hard over a very thorny issue…. They are doing their work…. They’re hearing from experts and all sorts of things.”

The falsehood that the task force had met “once a month,” when actually it had scarcely met, was enough reason for me to contact Harris and ask where he’d gotten that (mis)information. He replied that it was “according to the DNC staffer coordinating the process.”

The basic problem with the working group is not only that it hasn’t done much of anything in the nearly eight months since DNC Chair Ken Martin announced it with great fanfare. The underlying hoax is that it was set up not to reflect the views of registered Democrats nationwide.

Polling is clear. Three-quarters of Democrats agree that “Israel is committing genocide,” and a large majority are more sympathetic to Palestinians than to Israelis by a 4-to-1 margin. But only a minority of the Middle East Working Group’s eight members has a record of supporting Palestinian rights, while several are firm supporters of Israel. The oil-and-water mix seems destined for stalemate or mere platitudes. But stalemate and platitudes appear to be just fine from here to the horizon for DNC leadership.

Such stalling mechanisms and scant real representation are as old as the political hills. In this case, an unfortunate boost has come from James Zogby, who for decades bravely worked inside the Democratic Party and elsewhere to advocate for the human rights of Palestinians, in sharp contrast to US foreign policy.

As the most prominent person in the Middle East Working Group, Zogby has hailed it as an important step forward. Aligning himself with Martin’s approach from the outset, he said that the new chair’s move to set it up was “politically thoughtful.”

Zogby can remember when, in the 1980s, party leaders did not want to hear the “p-word”—Palestinians. He has portrayed the current sparse intra-party discussion related to Israel as major progress. “Don’t count me among those who left New Orleans complaining of defeat,” Zogby wrote in an April 14 piece for The Nation.

After that article appeared, I spoke with Zogby, and he summarized his approach this way: “I have a tendency to feel like sometimes there are little victories, and I latch onto them. Moving to catch up to where Democrats are.”

Compare that approach to this assessment days ago from Mike Merryman-Lotze, the American Friends Service Committee’s director of Just Peace Global Policy: “The failure of the DNC to take even minimal action in the face of ethnic cleansing and genocide is shameful.”

When my RootsAction colleague India Walton loudly interrupted the DNC’s business as usual during its general session a week ago, she was challenging a political culture of conformity that has ongoing deadly consequences. The context involves a simple and crucial choice—between excessive patience or urgency that’s grounded in life-and-death human realities. Those realities exist very far away from the transactional atmosphere of entrenched political institutions.

All this matters for at least two profound reasons: One is that, on the merits, silent or euphemistic complicity with Israel’s methodical policies of ethnic cleansing and genocide is abhorrent.

And given the crystal-clear polling, the failure of the Democratic Party leadership to oppose military aid to Israel threatens to seriously damage the turnout needed to defeat Republicans at election time (as polls have shown was the case with Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign for president). “Eight-in-10 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents currently have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 69 percent last year and 53 percent in 2022,” the Pew Research Center reported last week.

In these exceedingly dystopian times, when realism is more important than ever, it’s a grave mistake to let rose-colored glasses distort vision and substitute undue patience for vital urgency.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Norman Solomon
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, includes an afterword about the Gaza war.
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In Historic Senate Vote, Over 75% of Democrats Vote to Block Arms Sales to Israel

The vote was the latest sign of Democrats' growing consensus against aid to Israel, as support for the country hits an all-time low.

By Michael Arria

April 17, 2026

Source: Mondoweiss

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaking at a student Q&A at Stanford University about “Who Controls the Future of AI: The Oligarchs or the People?” on February 20th 2026. (Wikimediacommons)

On Wednesday night, the Senate rejected a pair of resolutions that would have blocked the sale of bombs and bulldozers to Israel.

Although the Joint Resolutions of Disapproval, which were introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) failed to pass, a record number of Senators backed the effort. 40 Senators backed a resolution would have blocked the sale of $295 million in D9R and D9T Caterpillar bulldozers to Israel and 36 members voted for a resolution that would have stopped a $151.8 million sale of 1,000-pound bombs to Israel.

“The fact that 40 of 47 Democratic Senators voted to withhold military hardware from Israel is a new high water mark in holding Israel accountable for violating US and international law,” tweeted Center for International Policy Vice President for Government Affairs Dylan Williams.

Sanders has attempted to pass similar resolutions on three other occasions. Last April, just 15 Senators voted for them, while 27 Senators supported them in July.

In a statement released after the vote, Sanders pointed out that 80% of the Democratic caucus backed the mesaures.

“When we started this effort there were just 11 votes,” said Sanders. “Now, there are 40.”

“That shift reflects where the American people are,” he added. “Americans, whether they are Democrats, Republicans or independents, want to see our tax money invested in improving lives here at home — not used to kill innocent women and children in the Middle East and put American troops in harm’s way as part of Netanyahu’s illegal wars of expansion.”

The Sanders resolutions come amid a growing debate over military aid within the Democratic Party, which is just one component of a wider, ongoing battle over Israel.

Earlier this week, almost 100 activists were arrested outside the offices of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), two longtime supporters of Israel.

The action, which was organized by Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), called on the lawmakers, who are both longtime supporters of Israel, to block a pending U.S. sale of bombs to the country.  

“Schumer, Gillibrand, talk is cheap! / They’re sending bombs, how can you sleep?,” chanted the protesters.

Chelsea Manning, the former Army analyst who spent 7 years in military prison for leaking classified documents to Wikileaks, was one of the activists detained by police.

“From personal experience I understand that the cruelties of war are not inevitable. Our actions matter in shaping the course of history,” she said in a statement. “Senators Schumer and Gillibrand have repeatedly supported weapons sales to Israel that are being used to commit atrocities across Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran. We call on Senators Schumer and Gillibrand to follow the will of New Yorkers and vote to block weapons and bulldozer sales to Israel.”

Schumer and Gillibrand were two of the seven Democratic Senators to vote against the Sanders measure.

Earlier this month, at a forum held by New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC DSA), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told attendees that she would vote against any military aid to Israel, including Iron Dome funding.

The stance marked a public shift for the House member, as she voted present on an Iron Dome funding bill in 2021 and added her name to a 2024 letter opposed the sale of offensive weapons to Israel, but expressed support for the Iron Dome system.

Groups like DSA have been pressuring Ocasio-Cortez on the issue for years, and the New York chapter of organized endorsed her for reelection shortly after she clarified her position. Additionally, many have speculated that AOC is preparing for a 2028 presidential run and her shift firmly aligns her with a Democratic base that has completely turned on Israel as a result of the genocide in Gaza. A recent Pew poll showed that eight-in-ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents now have a negatibe view of Israel.

“Israel is going to be so villianized across the Democratic base that it will burn candidates like [California Governor] Gavin Newsom who fumble it,” political consultant Peter Feld told Mondoweiss.

“More than anything, the Iran war has probably been the issue,” an anonymous swing-district House Democrat told Axios. “That’s the bigger issue because you have people like, ‘Why are we in this f*cking war?’ And all lines lead to Netanyahu.”

This political reality that Feld describes has produced a situation where longtime supporters of Israel are recalibrating their public position on the issue.

This includes former Chicago Mayor and presidential hopeful Rahm Emanuel, who has been a strident supporter of the country for decades.

“Look, nobody else has the Iron Dome,” Emanuel recently declared. “There’s a lot of other countries that want it! Now, what you can say about Iron Dome is that it was jointly developed, so that’s something we have to think through. But what I’m saying is, you won’t get taxpayer support anymore. You’re going to pay full price. You don’t have special status.”

Emanuel’s comments align with statements from the liberal Zionist group J Street, who have called for a “reassessment” of the U.S./Israel relationship and U.S. aid to be phased out by 2028. The organization’s decision has generated headlines, and earned more condemnation from AIPAC, but activists point out the move is merely cosmetic, as J Street still believes that the U.S. government should continue selling weapons to Israel.

“The United States should continue to sell short-range air and ballistic missile defense (BMD) capabilities to Israel,” explains J Street’s website. “Systems such as Iron Dome, David’s Sling and Arrow are jointly developed by Israel and the United States, with American companies working alongside Israel to produce the interceptors for these systems. As such, even though the systems are Israeli, they incorporate US technology.”

This position, where Israel is expected to buy weapons rather than receive them for free, does not contradict comments from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who told The Economist that his country would attempt to wean itself off U.S. military aid over the next decade.

“We want to be as independent as possible,” claimed Netanyahu.

Ahmad Abuznaid, Executive Director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), told Mondoweiss that activists have to keep pushing for a full arms embargo.

“The writing is on the wall, and we see politicians reacting to the fact that aid to Israel and AIPAC are toxic,” said Abuznaid. “But we have to dig deeper because there is a distinction. We need to control the narrative. We need to end support for genocide and occupation. That’s the moral, ethical, and legal position.”

Last month, NBC News released a poll showing that just 13% of Democrats view Israel positively, while almost 60% view it negatively.Email

Michael Arria

Michael Arria is a U.S. correspondent for Mondoweiss. His work has appeared in In These Times, The Appeal, and Truthout. He is the author of Medium Blue: The Politics of MSNBC

‘You Are Out of Touch’: Schumer Faces New Calls to Step Aside After Israel Weapons Vote

“It’s well past time for him to step aside for leaders who actually represent the views of the party’s base.”



Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) speaks during a news conference in the US Capitol on April 14, 2026.
(Photo by Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)

Jake Johnson
Apr 16, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Sen. Chuck Schumer faced fresh calls to step aside as the Senate Democratic leader on Wednesday after he broke with the overwhelming majority of his caucus and voted against a pair of resolutions aimed at preventing the Trump administration from selling more US bombs and bulldozers to Israel.

“Mr. Schumer, you are out of touch with the base of this party, and with your own caucus,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who first called on Schumer to resign as Democratic leader last year, said in a short video posted to social media following Wednesday’s votes. “Step aside.”

The two resolutions, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), called for halting the sale of around $450 million worth of bulldozers, 1,000-pound bombs, and related military equipment to the Israeli government, which has repeatedly used American weaponry to commit war crimes in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories, Lebanon, and Syria.

Despite facing record support from the Senate Democratic caucus—with 40 votes to block the sale of bulldozers and 36 votes to block the sale of bombs—the resolutions failed to pass, as Senate Republicans united against them.

But strong Democratic opposition to new US weapons sales to Israel was seen as evidence that the party is slowly catching up to its base, which overwhelmingly supports restricting American military aid to Israel.

“The fact that 40 of 47 Democratic senators voted to withhold military hardware from Israel is a new high-water mark in holding Israel accountable for violating US and international law,” said Dylan Williams, vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy.

Williams went on to rebuke Schumer, who has led the Senate Democrats for nearly a decade, for opposing the resolutions “against the supermajority of his own caucus and Democratic voters.”

“It’s well past time for him to step aside for leaders who actually represent the views of the party’s base,” said Williams.

Beth Miller, political director of Jewish Voice for Peace Action and a New York City resident, said Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)—who also voted against both resolutions—“are betraying their constituents and woefully out of line with the Democratic voter base.”

“Instead of sending the bombs that Israel uses to commit war crimes, the people of New York want our representatives to invest in lifesaving policies here at home,” said Miller. “We need to stop arming Israel so that the people of Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran, and across the region, can live. Millions of lives depend on it.”

The votes on the Israeli arms measures came after the Senate rejected another war powers resolution aimed at withdrawing US forces from the illegal assault on Iran, which President Donald Trump launched without congressional approval—and in partnership with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—in late February.

Schumer vocally supported the Iran war powers resolution. But one of his colleagues, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), said the efforts to end the US-Israeli war on Iran and the push to halt weapons sales to Israel are interconnected.

“A vote to approve arms sales to Israel at this time would be seen as a message of approval for Trump and Netanyahu’s disastrous war against Iran. I will not send that message,” Markey said in a statement late Wednesday. “Why would we send American military weapons that could prolong, escalate, or worsen this horrible situation in the Middle East? I say no more.”

J Street, the pro-Israel liberal advocacy organization, similarly connected the two fights following Wednesday’s votes.

“We continue to oppose Trump and Netanyahu’s war of choice against Iran, and applaud those senators whose principled stand in today’s vote reflects the American public’s strong opposition to both the Iran war and to Israel’s actions in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank that undermine efforts for peace in the region,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the group’s president.

‘Cowardly Bullshit’: Handful of Dems Join Senate GOP to Block Ban on US Bombs, Bulldozers to Israel

“The fact that 40 of 47 Democratic senators voted to withhold military hardware from Israel is a new high water mark in holding Israel accountable,” said one observer, who called the final vote “still troubling.”



Protesters hold a banner reading “Stop Sending Arms to Israel” outside the White House in Washington, DC in this undated photo.
(Photo by Amnesty International)

Brett Wilkins
Apr 15, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

US senators on Wednesday voted down a pair of resolutions aimed at blocking US bomb and bulldozer sales to Israel as it continues its genocidal war on Gaza and devastating bombardment and mass displacement in Lebanon.

Upper chamber lawmakers voted 59-40 against advancing SJ Res. 32, a joint resolution introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) “providing for congressional disapproval of the proposed foreign military sale to the government of Israel of certain defense articles and services.”

At issue are $295 million worth of Caterpillar D9 series bulldozers, spare parts, and related services. Israel often uses the bulldozers to destroy homes and other civilian structures in Gaza, the illegally occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Lebanon.




In 2003, American human rights activist Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by a Caterpillar D9 while attempting to stop the demolition of a home in Rafah, Gaza.



Entire villages and hamlets have been razed using the dozers as Israel ethnically cleanses the occupied territories to make way for Jewish-only settler colonies.

The SJ Res. 32 roll call was followed by a 63-36 vote against advancing SJ Res. 138, which was introduced by Sanders and Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), and Peter Welch (D-Vt.). The measure rejects the proposed sale of 12,000 BLU–110A/B general purpose, 1,000-pound bomb bodies and associated items and services.

Experts point to Israel’s use of 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs in densely populated Gaza—and the Israeli military’s loosened rules of engagement effectively allowing unlimited civilian casualties in strikes targeting a single Hamas militant of any rank—as a major reason why so many Gazans are being killed and injured.

Sanders said on social media after the votes, “Today, more than 80% of the Democratic caucus stood with the American people and voted to block US military aid to [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and his horrific, illegal wars.”

“We are making progress,” the senator continued. “When we started this effort there were just 11 votes, now there are 40.”


Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said following Wednesday’s votes:
A vote to approve arms sales to Israel at this time would be seen as a message of approval for [President Donald] Trump and Netanyahu’s disastrous war against Iran. I will not send that message.

Why would we send American military weapons that could prolong, escalate, or worsen this horrible situation in the Middle East? I say no more. The Senate should express its opposition to Trump and Netanyahu’s needless war in Iran and seek to stop it in any way it can.

There is no military solution to this crisis. We must solve this at the negotiating table. We must stop these arms sales and end this war now.

Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy (CIP) and a former adviser to Sanders, slammed Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) who voted to block the resolutions, for their “cowardly bullshit.”

Duss noted that just last September, Coons said that “if there is no change in direction from the Israeli administration, for the first time I would seriously consider” voting to block arms transfers to Israel.

“Israeli behavior has only gotten worse since then,” Duss said.

Wednesday’s votes followed numerous previous failed attempts to limit US arms transfers to Israel since it launched its genocidal retaliation for the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, which has left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead, wounded, or missing.

Dylan Williams, vice president for government affairs at CIP, said on X that “the fact that 40 of 47 Democratic senators voted to withhold military hardware from Israel is a new high water mark in holding Israel accountable for violating US and international law.”

“It is still troubling that a few Democrats and all Republicans voted to supply the arms,” he added.



The Biden and Trump administrations have lavished Israel with more than $21 billion in armed aid since October 2023, despite the International Criminal Court’s issuance of arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza.

In 47-52 Vote, Senate GOP Blocks Another Iran War Powers Resolution

“Trump’s war of choice in Iran is a moral tragedy and economic disaster playing out before our eyes. It is only making the United States and the world less safe,” said Sen. Ed Markey.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth, (D-Ill.) speaks during the Senate Democrats’ news conference in the U.S. Capitol on April 14, 2026.
(Photo by Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)

Stephen Prager
Apr 15, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Senate Republicans on Wednesday once again narrowly stymied a Democrat-led resolution aimed at reining in President Donald Trump’s power to wage war against Iran.

Although the war launched by the US and Israel in late February has killed more than 1,700 civilians and sparked a global fuel crisis that has sent prices skyrocketing, that was not enough for 52 Republican senators—every one except libertarian Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)—who voted to back the president even as the war further erodes his approval rating.

The Democratic caucus was similarly unified, with every member voting for the war powers resolution except the pro-Israel hawk Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.).

It was the fourth war powers resolution to fail in the Senate since Trump launched the war on February 28, The last measure in late March fell short by a nearly identical margin.

Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) called Democrats’ continued attempts to check Trump’s war powers “exhausting” in comments to reporters on Tuesday. “Doing a war powers resolution just undermines the president. I don’t believe [the Democrats] would do that if the president had a ‘D’ behind his name.”

After more than two weeks of delay, a similar bill will be brought to the floor in the House of Representatives on Thursday. Its sponsor, Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said it has a good chance of passing.

But without a similar bill passing the Senate, it would remain a purely symbolic gesture, with no ability to limit Trump’s power as he sends thousands more troops to the region immediately after saying the war was “close to over.”

“Trump’s war of choice in Iran is a moral tragedy and economic disaster playing out before our eyes. It is only making the United States and the world less safe,” said Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) after voting for the war powers resolution. “We have seen thousands of civilian deaths in Iran and Lebanon. More than 100 Iranian schoolgirls were killed by American weapons, and 13 American servicemembers were killed, and hundreds have been injured.”

He added, “This dangerous, unnecessary, and expensive war has cost American taxpayers around $50 billion so far, with the Trump administration seeking hundreds of billions of dollars more as part of a $1.5 trillion military budget.”

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), an Army National Guard veteran who sponsored the blocked resolution, suggested in her remarks before the vote that Republicans who opposed the resolution would be putting “Trump’s ego first” ahead of American interests and enabling more “chaos.”

The two-week ceasefire agreement is set to expire on April 21. A week later, the war will hit the 60-day mark, after which troops must be withdrawn unless their deployment is approved by Congress, though the White House can request a 30-day extension by citing “national security” concerns.

According to Politico, some Republicans—even those who voted against the war powers resolution on Wednesday—have indicated that the 60-day mark may be a turning point for them.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), who is retiring after the next election, said that the administration “has got to start answering questions” about the war’s trajectory, especially as it requests tens of billions of dollars in emergency funding.

Duckworth, on the other hand, said she has seen more than enough.

“After one half-assed day of so-called ‘negotiations,’ he’s whipsawed to his next idea: a dangerous, complex, partial military blockade of the Strait of Hormuz—once again launching a risky new front in this war at our service members’ expense… with no justification, explanation, or even ‘concept of a plan’ of how to get to an end-state,” she said.

She added, “As our troops continue to sacrifice whatever is asked of them, we senators need to do the absolute minimum required of us.”

Lone Democrat—Jared Golden—Helps GOP Tank Another Iran War Powers Resolution

“It is deeply disappointing that Rep. Golden joined Republicans in opposing efforts to stop further escalation,” said one peace advocate. “Democratic leadership’s handling of this moment is also concerning.”


Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) was pictured at a news conference in Washington, DC on July 17, 2025.
(Photo by Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)

Jake Johnson
Apr 16, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

With the decisive support of one Democrat—Rep. Jared Golden of Maine—the Republican-controlled House of Representatives on Thursday voted down a war powers resolution aimed at ending President Donald Trump’s illegal assault on Iran, over six weeks after it began.

The final vote was 213-214, with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) joining nearly every House Democrat in supporting the resolution, which would have forced Trump to withdraw American troops from hostilities in Iran absent congressional authorization. Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) voted present and Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) didn’t vote, despite criticizing the war and telling reporters last month that she would “most likely” support the Democratic resolution.

In the lead-up to Thursday’s vote, Democratic leaders—including the resolution’s chief sponsor, Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York—faced backlash for slowwalking the legislative effort to end the war even as it appeared that momentum was on their side. Earlier this month, the House Democratic leadership opted to punt the war powers vote until after spring recess, during which the Trump administration and Iran’s government reached a tenuous ceasefire deal.

Three of the four House Democrats who voted against an Iran war powers resolution in early March flipped their votes on Thursday: Reps. Henry Cuellar of Texas, Greg Landsman of Ohio, and Juan Vargas of California. Golden, who also voted against the earlier resolution, is not running for reelection.

“While we are encouraged to see growing support,” said Demand Progress senior policy adviser Cavan Kharrazian, “it is deeply disappointing that Rep. Golden joined Republicans in opposing efforts to stop further escalation, casting a decisive vote against the resolution.”

“Democratic leadership’s handling of this moment is also concerning,” said Kharrazian. “They previously declined to force a war powers vote before a critical period of escalation before recess, citing a lack of votes. Now they have moved forward under less favorable conditions, including during sensitive ceasefire negotiations, but still without the votes they previously claimed were necessary before proceeding, and with a changed balance in the House. That inconsistency raises a serious question about what is driving leadership’s priorities: strategy or politics.”

“We urge members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, to support sustained diplomatic efforts to resolve this conflict,” Kharrazian added. “The American people overwhelmingly reject this war and want a diplomatic end to it.”

The House voted marked the sixth time an Iran-related war powers resolution has failed in the House or Senate since Trump started bombing on February 28.

Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) said Thursday that he supported the war powers effort on Thursday because “Trump’s war of choice was not authorized by Congress, was started without a plan or an exit strategy, and has achieved none of the contradictory objectives used to justify it.”

“Trump’s war in Iran is deeply unpopular,” Pocan added, “and it’s time to end what never should have started.”

Ryan Costello, policy director with the National Iranian American Council, said in a statement that “the narrow defeat of a resolution to definitively end the war on Iran is another tragic missed opportunity, but the gap between public opposition to the war and votes to end it is narrowing.”

“All but one House Democrat voted unanimously in support of the resolution but were joined by just one Republican,” said Costello. “Golden will need to answer to his Maine constituents, many of whom are veterans and pro-peace Americans who question why Washington so consistently sends brave servicemembers into ill-advised, disastrous wars of choice that kill civilians and sabotage the global economy. So too do all of the Republicans who chose again not to use their power to convince President Trump to take an off-ramp and end this disastrous war that puts Benjamin Netanyahu’s dreams, not the American people and American security, first.”

 

Three principles of ecosocialist politics

By Kai Heron

Published 14 April, 2026

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)

• 1

  Engels, Friedrich, and Tristram Hunt. 2009. The Condition of the Working Class in England. Edited by Victor Kiernan. Penguin Classics.

• 2

  Carrington, Damian, Damian Carrington Environment editor, Alessia Amitrano, et al. 2024. ‘“Hopeless and Broken”: Why the World’s Top Climate Scientists Are in Despair’. Environment. The Guardian, May 8.

•  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2024/may/08/hopeless-and-broken-why-the-worlds-top-climate-scientists-are-in-despair

• 3

  Hare, Nathan. 1970. ‘Black Ecology’. The Black Scholar 1 (6): 2–8.

• 4

  Oliver, Craig. 2025. ‘The Public Don’t Understand Net Zero - It’s Time for New Arguments’. City AM, June 16. https://www.cityam.com/the-public-dont-understand-net-zero-its-time-for-new-arguments/

• 5

  Cabral, Amilcar. 1965. ‘Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories...’ Marxists.Org. https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1965/tnlcnev.htm.

• 6

  Lenin, Vladimir. 2010. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Penguin Classics.

• 7

  Balmford, Andrew, Thomas S. Ball, Ben Balmford, et al. 2025. ‘Time to Fix the Biodiversity Leak’. Science 387 (6735): 720–22. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adv8264.

• 8

  Lenin, Vladimir. 1922. ‘The Question of Nationalities or “Autonomisation”’. Marxists.Org. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/autonomy.htm.

• 9

  Liebknecht:, Karl. 1915. ‘The Main Enemy Is At Home!’ Marxists.Org. https://www.marxists.org/archive/liebknecht-k/works/1915/05/main-enemy-home.htm.

Capitalism is the problem. Ecosocialism is the solution.

By Harry Fairless

Published 13 April, 2026

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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)