Tuesday,
April 16, 2019
A Path to Democratic Socialism
Means a Path To Climate Justice
Through ecosocialism, we can fight climate
change and extreme inequality at the same time
commondreams.org
This piece is a
response to “We Don’t Have Time to End Capitalism—But Growth Can Still
Be Green.”
While the question of
whether we should address capitalism first or climate change first is often
posed in sequential terms, it is a false choice—though a compelling one.
One can cogently argue,
as Tobita does, that the timeline to avert the worst of climate chaos is
exceedingly short, much shorter than the time it would take to overthrow and
replace capitalism. But one can also argue, as Ashley does, that the climate
crisis is historically a symptom of capitalism, and that this has intensified
since the post-war Great Acceleration of globalized
production and consumption. Accordingly, the reasoning goes, we can’t deal with
the climate crisis without first dismantling capitalism.
We need to act as
quickly as possible, and we need to target the root causes of climate change.
But we can, and should, do both simultaneously.
Both of these
sequential framings, however, miss an important truth: The path to democratic
socialism and the path to a livable planet are one and the same.
My argument recognizes
what is correct in each of the sequential framings: We need to act as quickly
as possible, and we need to target the root causes of climate change. But we
can, and should, do both simultaneously.
Ecosocialism is a form
of critique that roots environmental destruction in the imperatives of
capitalism: profit-seeking, competition, endless growth, exploitation of humans
and nature, and imperial expansion. In line with this trenchant critique, the
strategic political insight of ecosocialism is that the most transformative
approaches to addressing climate change would also bring us closer to a
socialist society.
There are many examples
of such a transformative approach: mass, public, zero carbon housing; mass, free,
zero-carbon transit; bringing private, investor-owned energy utilities
under public, democratic and community control, as
well as transitioning them to renewable energy sources. These policies address
environmental ills and social ills at the same time, while also freeing our
political system from the clutches of planet-killing corporations. And, by
violating the sanctity of property and profit, they would put us on the path
towards a society centered on human need and ecological sustainability.
Perhaps most
importantly, fighting both climate change and extreme inequality simultaneously
is adept political strategy. For one, wealthy countries and wealthy individuals contribute a
disproportionate share of emissions. And if economically precarious people do
not think they have something to gain from taking urgent action on climate
change, they will never commit to the scale or militancy of mobilization that
is required. Just look to France’s ideologically inchoate Yellow Vests movement, sparked in response to
a gas tax, to see that neoliberal climate policy without social justice at the
center is a political dead end.
This is not to say that
an ecosocialist strategy has no political tensions or challenges.
There will necessarily
be changes in habits of consumption, habits that are by no means confined to
the affluent. We need to catalyze a change in social values, wherein communal
activities such as recreational sports, dancing, art projects and book clubs as
well as forms of collective consumption—not only of transit and housing but of
food, theater, film and much more—become valorized. We must eat less red meat,
and devalue the consumption of plastic junk and latest-model cell phones and
other tech that not only contribute to social alienation but are tremendously
destructive to the planet: manufactured for obsolescence, shipped across great
distances in carbon-spewing ships and trucks, and relying on neocolonial
patterns of cheapened nature and labor in the Global South. And we need to ensure that
redistribution and the public provisioning of goods and services like transit
and healthcare would offset the increased costs of some consumer items.
The greatest challenge
will be building a mass movement ready to take militant
action to threaten and disrupt economics and politics as usual, with all the
backlash from the ruling class and neoliberal establishment such a movement
will provoke. There are inspiring examples to draw on, from pipeline resistance
at Standing Rock to the recent wave of teachers’ strikes, some of which
directly involved climate demands such as taxing extractive companies or
investing in green spaces.
If we fail, there will
still be a future—just an awful one, full of social conflict, dislocation and
violence. The impacts of climate change will be felt unequally, intensifying
inequality along the lines of class, race, nationality and geography. The
national and global 1% will protect themselves from rising seas, extreme
temperatures and resource scarcity by any means necessary, erecting border
walls and fortresses while the rest of us suffer. The question of climate
change, as the editors of n+1 have pointed out, is who gets to
live—and under what circumstances.
The choices are
ecosocialism or eco-apartheid.
© 2019 In
These Times
Thea N. Riofrancos is assistant professor of
political science at Providence College and serves on the steering committee of
the Democratic Socialists of America’s ecosocialist working group. Her
forthcoming book is Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to
Post-Extractivism in Ecuador.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center,
325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email:
mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the
subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to
gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and
everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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