The following is an edited version of Jess Spear’s presentation to the Ecosocialism 2024 Conference in Boorloo/Perth, Western Australia. Spear is an ecosocialist activist and local organiser for People Before Profit based in Dublin, Ireland.
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I’m honoured to contribute what I can to the discussion on the case for ecosocialism.
I want to start by introducing you all to a catastrophic event that took place on the earth around 12,000 years ago.
At that time the earth was just coming out of its last ice age. An increasing amount of solar radiation was pouring into the Northern Hemisphere and atmospheric greenhouse gases were rapidly increasing.
Massive ice sheets that had grown over North America and Scandinavia during the preceding 100,000 years were receding rapidly, raising global sea level by hundreds of metres.
Then, all of a sudden, Europe was plunged back into an ice age. In the course of two to three decades temperatures plummeted, sea ice expanded and mountain glaciers started to grow again. The frigid conditions would persist for another 1300 years before warming resumed and the earth fully emerged from the ice age.
This event was first discovered by scientists looking at lake sediments.
They found the fossil remains of an Arctic flower, Dryas Octopela, but over time it was discoveries made by scientists examining marine fossils from deep ocean sediments that helped us to better understand what likely took place.
The main cause of this abrupt climate event was the earth getting warmer. How can that be? How can warming trigger a return to an ice-age climate?
Ocean is key
Seventy-one percent of the planet is covered by ocean, so the ocean is key to regulating our climate.
Disrupt the ocean and you disrupt the climate.
That's because the ocean moves heat around the earth by major currents. Warm water on the surface flows from the tropics to the north, where it cools, giving off its heat to Europe, and then sinks to form a deep-water cold current. The warm current is connected to the cold current like a big conveyor belt. This conveyor belt system is how heat is transported around the earth.
When the earth was warming 15,000 years ago, freshwater was pouring off the land from melting ice sheets and glaciers and into the ocean — right where the deep cold current forms. Remember, the saltier the water, the heavier. So the freshwater pouring in made the water too light to sink and shut down the conveyor belt, stopping the heat transport system. This meant that heat from the tropics was no longer being moved north and a return to ice age climate.
After another thousand years or so the circulation began again and we fully emerged from the ice age to the Holocene conditions of today. These are the conditions in which civilisation was developed, in which countless cultures have been created. These are the conditions in which humans cultivated plants and animals for food and power.
I think we all understand that the relatively stable climate and ecosystems of the last 10,000 years are gone. Year after year more and more oil and gas is being dug up and burned, trapping more and more heat, fueling a torrent of extreme weather events.
And once again, as the earth is warming rapidly. The ice sheets are melting. Freshwater is pouring into the North Atlantic.
Scientists say there are already signs that the ocean’s conveyor belt is slowing. New research suggests the ocean conveyor belt could be shut down, like it was in the past, within the next few decades.
Now, this wouldn’t plunge us into an ice age. The conditions are different this time. But it would have catastrophic consequences for everybody on the earth.
Europe would become cooler, but the tropics and the whole of the southern hemisphere where you all live would get hotter. And the areas where it’s too hot to live and work would expand.
It would also shift the major rain belts and affect the monsoons. That means, the most important impact on us, would be on our food system.
Our global food system
Over the last 50 years, agribusiness and big food corporations have molded our food system, from what we eat — increasingly “The Global Standard Diet” whereby wheat, rice, corn and soy account for almost 60% of the calories grown by farmers — to how people access and even think about their food.
This means that locally, we have more diverse food, but globally, we do not. And crucially, that means our food system is extremely vulnerable to shocks.
George Monbiot writes about this in his recent book, Regenesis: How to Feed the World Without Devouring the Planet.
These farms are not only at risk of harvest failures. They are also monoculture dead zones for wildlife. Agriculture is the biggest driver of wildlife population declines and species extinction, better known as the biodiversity crisis.
That’s because firstly their expansion has meant deforestation and destruction of ecosystems. But also year after year they use huge amounts of inputs — fertilisers and pesticides — that destroy the soil ecosystem, pollute our rivers and lakes and create massive dead zones in coastal waters. These farms are also highly irrigated and are powered and fed by fossil fuels.
Despite the promoted image of the small family farm, the vast majority of farms — more than 70% — are owned or controlled by just 1% of “farmers”, which include investment banks, pension funds, hedge funds and private-equity vehicles.
And of course these farmers are not and never have been interested in producing nutritious food. They are interested in producing profits.
Rise of the far right
So in the face of these compounding risks — of abrupt climate change and major disruptions to our food system — what has been the response of capital and governments?
After decades of dragging their feet, they accept the science of climate change and biodiversity loss. But their solution, of course, is the market.
We must tax ordinary people. Charge them for driving their cars. Tell them to stop using straws and paper cups. Recycle more. They must change, not the big oil companies who are actually burning our future, nor the big tech companies building data centre after data centre, driving up energy needs.
And for the actual small farmers who already face extreme weather events and reduced crop yields, who already don’t make enough to get by, they have to change, not the big meat processing plants and grocery store giants that set the prices.
This approach to climate and biodiversity action, which says ordinary people’s lives must radically change, that you must change your life, while the system causing the crisis — capitalism — is maintained, has fueled a new climate denialism and pushed a section of people towards far-right and fascist parties.
In the recent European elections, the far right finished first in France, Italy and Austria and came second in Germany and the Netherlands.
In Ireland, the far right got into local councils for the first time and a right populist candidate gained a European seat for the first time.
And all of this: the risk of climate tipping points, of species extinction, of more violence, death and destruction, of the rise of the far right and fascism again, pushing back women's rights and gains for the LGBTQ+ community. This will continue as long as this system is in place.
Capitalism cannot get us out because capitalism equals barbarism.
We, and our life support systems are being sacrificed on the altar of profits for the very very wealthy, not us. We don’t benefit.
What is to be done?
Strategically, we need to place an understanding of the ecological crisis at the centre of what we are doing. We are not just ecosocialists when we are campaigning about the environment and socialists the rest of the time. We are ecosocialists when we are trade unionists and housing activists.
Within the trade union movement, we are the people saying that the ecological crisis is a workers’ issue and we need to be involved. Within the environmental movement, we are the ones pointing to the power of the organised working class and the need for the system change to be ecosocialist change.
Programmatically, we need to reject any promotion of growth as the answer to the crises that the majority of people on this earth face. Instead, we have to recognise that in order to sustain a livable future for humanity, and for a just transition for all — workers, small farmers and Indigenous peoples in the Global South and the advanced capitalist countries — it is necessary to reduce the total energy consumption and raw materials.
That’s for two reasons.
First, to quicken the transition to 100% renewable energy. Secondly, to avoid further breaches of the other planetary boundaries. We can’t allow more and more extraction of minerals — like copper, cobalt and lithium from the Global South — to make more and more cars for the rich countries, devastating nearby environments and communities.
That means degrowth to zero energy usage on the military and advertising. It means drastic reductions in the incredible, disgusting consumption of the super-rich, with bans of private jets and yachts. This would allow growth in energy usage for people in the Global South within planetary boundaries.
It means advocating for a good life for every person on the planet. That does not mean a superabundance of material private goods. Instead, we want high-quality public goods, the decommodification of the commons and all aspects of life, and the healing of the rift between humanity and nature. An emphasis on being rather than having.
We want mass retrofitting of people’s homes to reduce energy consumption and investment in green jobs including so-called care jobs (childcare, education and healthcare). We want free, green and frequent public transport, getting people out of private cars. We want universal basic services, a ban on planned obsolescence and enshrining a right-to-repair of all consumer goods.
We want an agricultural model ensuring the right to decent income for all farmers while shifting away from high energy-intensive beef and dairy farming to low-energy regenerative farming. We want a four-day week without loss of pay. And crucially, we want a democratically planned economy so that we can collectively choose what to spend our energy and resources on.
Ecosocialism or barbarism
At the beginning of the World War I, the revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg who was campaigning against that war declared that: “Today, we face the choice — either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration — a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international working class against imperialism and its method of war.”
Today, more than 100 years later, the choice is the same: ecosocialism — a socialism that centres the ecological crises — or barbarism.
We have a choice here. The climate has changed, but every 10th of a degree matters. Every ecosystem matters and of course, every human life matters. We do not have to accept this rotten system which threatens everything we hold dear.
We have to build the “conscious active struggle of the international working class against imperialism” to stop the destruction and save as much as we can. But we should not just build a defense. We must also go on the offense and build a movement not just to tear down this system, but to build another world — an ecosocialist world.
[Jess Spear, originally from the United States, worked as a climate scientist for the US Geological Survey before becoming a full-time socialist organiser. She is co-founder of the revolutionary Marxist group RISE and was chief editor of Rupture magazine.]