“The 19th and 20th centuries were dominated by the ‘socialist question’. The 21st will be dominated by the new ‘ecosocialist’ question.” (Tanuro, 2013:p18)
Humanity is living in the epoch of climate and ecological catastrophes. Climate experts bombard us with one bleak and dreadful forecast after another. Year after year in recent decades, our warming planet has broken new greenhouse gas pollution and heat records. As our planet boils, the icesheets melt at greater speed, dumping billions of tons of ice in the oceans. Rising sea levels and warmer oceans endanger the livelihoods of people living in sinking island states and along shrinking coastlines. Victims of these ecological disasters are the dispossessed, exploited and impoverished majorities – the have-nots in capitalism. Countering this destruction of our planet is a life-and-death struggle. Anti-capitalists can only ignore or downplay the urgency of ecological struggles at our own peril.
The COP28 summit of the United Nations, hosted by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) from 30 Nov through 13 Dec 2023, offers a glimpse of the high stakes in the fight to safeguard our planet. Before, during and after this latest UN climate summit, the battles for ideas intensified. Polluters and fossil fuel capitalists bankrolled gangs of scientists, lobbyists, NGOs and media pundits to fabricate a mix of pseudo-science and unfiltered lies on climate crises and how to overcome these. Therefore, defeating ‘global warming denialist’ propaganda must be a central part of anti-capitalist ecological struggles.
Combating the denialism that capitalists destroy the environment for profit, has inspired a growing volume of ecological justice literature. In this proliferating literature, three books offer climate justice activists essential and enlightening introductions to ecological debates and struggles. These books are: Green Capitalism: why it can’t work, written by Daniel Tanuro (published by Merlin Press (with Socialist Resistance Books and IIRE) in 2013); Ecosocialism: A Radical Alternative to Capitalist Catastrophe, written by Michael Löwy (published by Haymarket Books in 2015); and Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, written by Kohei Saito (published by Monthly Review Press in 2017). Each book delves into the ecological question in a unique way. But if one thinks through the substance of the arguments advanced in each book, then it is clear that the respective authors also reinforce common insights that merit constant reminders.
Recover and Enrich Legacies of Marxism
The authors ground themselves on the principles and scientific logic of Marxism. The founders of this worldview, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, never left behind a finished theory on ecological questions. This does not mean that they neither studied nor wrote about nature, ecology and the environment. On the contrary, Marx and Engels were encyclopaedic giants who left us farsighted analyses on nature and ecology, all tightly woven into their voluminous writings on political economy, philosophy and revolutionary strategy.
Marx’s monumental critique of bourgeois political economy, Kohei Saito demonstrates, integrates ecological propositions that anticipated conclusions that natural science experts later derived from their own discoveries. Insights from Marx’s ecological notebooks made their way into Das Kapital but in deeply refined formulations. Saito retraces how Marx investigated the idea of the metabolism between human socioeconomic activity and nature on the basis of leading-edge science of nature debates of that era. Marx questioned the ‘social and natural metabolisms’ unique to a mode of production based on generalised commodity production, profit accumulation and labour exploitation. Capitalism deforms this interaction between human beings and nature. How then can the associated producers consciously regulate the ‘metabolic exchange between humans and nature’(p70)?
Critique of capitalist ecocide and climate science
Marx was neither an advocate of productivism nor a cheerleader of capitalist industrialisation. Ideologues of socialism-in-one-country, in catching up with destructive imperialist industrialism, deformed Marxism into this vulgar dogma in the service of Stalinism. Tanuro’s book does not only set the record straight on Marx’s profound ecological commitment, but also dissects the statements of bourgeois climate change apologists and denialists.
Tanuro works through copious statistics and complex arguments to reveal the causes, consequences and the vastness of our damaged climate. Climate crises originate from a mode of production which destroys the environment for profit. This book details the heinous crimes of fossil fuel corporations, agribusinesses and finance capitalists against the planet and humanity. Harping on human-made global warming is thus misleading as it hides how the logic of capitalist commodity production leads to ecocide. Tanuro’s microscopic interrogation of climate questions examines the chemical makeup of carbon dioxide and other lethal greenhouse gases, making the book a pivotal guide for any meaningful reading of the scientific reports published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Corporate polluters and the climate scientists on their payroll, nowadays parade themselves as the rescuers of the world from ecological catastrophes. Their greenwashing, carbon trading, greenhouse gas budgets, geoengineering and clean development technology (Kyoto Protocol) schemes, Tanuro demonstrates, amount to nothing but diabolical plans to commodify solutions to climate crises for profit. So much for the insatiable greed of capitalism!
Self-organise for Ecosocialist Democracy
Environmental justice revolts have gained momentum worldwide, giving birth to an incipient global ecosocialist movement. Löwy traces the history of this movement as part of a balance sheet of struggles for another world, based on ecological socialism. This Radical Alternative is indeed a guide to revolutionary action, agitating oppressed and exploited majorities to liberate humanity from the trap of capitalist ecocide. Replacing capitalism with ecosocialism calls for a break with the logic of ecological destruction for profit and dismantling the capitalist productive apparatus. How to accomplish this pressing epochal transition is the key question this book answers.
Traditions of ecological activism differ. Löwy, in the same vein as Tanuro, calls into question the reasoning and actions of ‘green activists’ who reject the Marxist worldview on ecology. These anti-Marxist environmentalists are in an unenviable trap and run the risk of championing the myths of green capitalism.
Beyond the critical reflections on the strategies of ecological activism, the book elaborates organisational, political and theoretical principles for ecosocialism. Programmatic action in defence of the planet and humanity is also evident from the inclusion of the International Ecosocialist Manifesto and The Lima Ecosocialist Declaration at the end of this book. The clarion message that echoes from this book acts as an inspiring companion to the other two books: the dispossessed and labouring classes must self-organise into an ecosocialist force to end global ecological catastrophes.