The Global Ecosocialist Network (GEN) and Marxmail.world co-hosted a “Roadmap to Ecosocialism” forum on September 10 to discuss the strategies and tactics needed to move beyond capitalism.
The invited speakers were Rehad Desai, a climate justice activist and documentary filmmaker from South Africa; Howie Hawkins, a long-time activist in the labour and environmental movements in the US; Simon Pirani, British researcher and lecturer focused on energy transition and technologies; and Sabrina Fernandes, Brazilian sociologist and political economist.
With no global “blueprint” for building class-conscious and internationalist movements, the activists presented their thoughts on the strategy and tactics needed to challenge the power of fossil-fuel capitalism. The discussion was wide-ranging and included ecosocialist degrowth, the upcoming Conference of the Parties in Brazil and the need to continue strategising.
Desai emphasised the devastating impact of global heating on Africa and the necessity of a deep, just transition. Hawkins discussed the ecosocialist Green New Deal (GND) in the US, which emphasises public ownership and planning. Pirani discussed the importance of a socialist approach to technologies, advocating for public ownership and decentralised renewable energy and Fernandes highlighted the threats of green colonialism and the need to de-commodify carbon.
Desai, who is also a member of GEN’s steering committee, prefaced his talk by reminding us that capitalism has brought “unspeakable horrors” over its five centuries of existence, particularly through its expansion via colonisation.
He recommended Sven Lindqvist’s book, Exterminate All the Brutes and the 2021 HBO series of the same name from acclaimed filmmaker Raoul Peck for their accounts of this.
Desai explored attitudes on the impacts of climate breakdown in the Global North (particularly the US), where, based on a recent survey, assumptions are made about a so-called superior capacity to survive because of technological advances, or being able to “live off grid”.
However, he said, “no one can escape societal breakdown, not even the rich”. Populations in the Global North are as much at risk due to the atomisation of society, reliance on complex supply chains and the inability of urban-based populations to readily adapt.
The Global North’s alternative to the climate threat is to arm itself and bunker down, Desai said. Ecosocialists’ alternative, on the other hand, “seeks to avoid climate catastrophe” and to present a vision “which centres humanity and nature at the front, centre and back of all its considerations”. He said this vision would entail “build[ing] equality through fighting for reforms and that protects nature in all its forms, as a foundation for our human existence.
“It’s a view that embraces ancient and spiritual knowledge, and sees humans as guardians of the natural environment.
“We argue against those that see … individual life choices, individual carbon footprints as a solution, and point to the need for systemic change that can take us away from the abyss that we all now face.”
Green New Deal
Hawkins described the US Green Party’s Ecosocialist GND as a “transitional program”, or “roadmap” to an ecosocialist society. This is “because its immediate demands, such as clean energy, universal health care, a job guarantee of public jobs for the unemployed, are incompatible with the profit interests of the capitalist rulers”.
Hawkins identified three “camps” in the GND debate in the US: liberal/Keynesian; neoliberal; and ecosocialist. He then traced the GND’s development in the US, dating back to 2000, and its later influence on campaigns by Greens in Europe and Britain. He said there had been a struggle to “delink” the GND from the historical “New Deal” associated with the US Democratic Party.
“An ecosocialist GND is a program to get to 100% clean energy, and then zero and then negative carbon emissions rapidly on the order of a decade,” Hawkins said. “It includes an economic Bill of Rights for guaranteeing universal access to a living wage, job and income above poverty, affordable housing, comprehensive health care, lifelong, free public education (from childcare through college) and a secure retirement by raising Social Security benefits.”
Hawkins explained that another of the GND’s key components is a Clean Energy Program, which “emphasises public enterprise and planning to coordinate the complex energy transition across different economic sectors”.
Hawkins raised the prospect of a global GND, envisioning the US as a “world humanitarian superpower” (in the words of former Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader) providing economic and technical assistance to other countries.
He said progressive Democratic candidates, such as Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC), had included the GND idea in her own campaign, inspiring young climate activists to take on the Democratic establishment — although “diluting the content” in the process.
This culminated in a non-binding resolution for a GND, proposed to Congress by AOC and Senator Ed Markey (Massachusetts), which left out a ban on fracking, building new fossil fuel infrastructure, phasing out nuclear power, deep cuts to military spending and a 2030 deadline of reaching 100% clean energy and zero carbon emissions (replaced with the demand for “net zero”).
Hawkins said the Democratic establishment worked to prevent the GND resolution being tabled in Congress and, when the Republicans put it to a vote in the Senate, the Democrats either abstained or voted against it.
Popular support for a GND still sits at 60–70%, and candidates in the 2020 Democratic primaries were forced to take a position. Even then-Vice Presidential nominee Kamala Harris adopted the slogan, but without committing to public spending and serious policy changes. Bernie Sanders was the only Democratic candidate at the time to offer an alternative to the party’s neoliberal approach.
Public ownership
Pirani talked up the need for a socialist approach to addressing the climate crisis, especially countering “narratives that portray the move away from fossil fuels as a simple switch of technologies, without any deep-going social change”.
Public ownership is not enough, he said, adding, it “needs to be combined with a liberatory vision of the future, and of the ways that technologies, liberated from capital, can be remade”.
“Socialists stand not only for common, social or public forms of ownership of the means of production, but also for changing what those means of production do. We are for the development of technologies that meet human needs, and [we are] against technologies that enhance the power of capital.”
Pirani also criticised those advocating various “technofixes”, such as carbon capture and storage and geoengineering and their promotion of “net zero”. He critiqued “supposed low-carbon fuels, such as hydrogen”, arguing that this is “a grand technological deception” because “producing hydrogen from fossil fuels simply perpetuates the use of those fuels. And hydrogen produced without fossil fuels has a very heavy energy cost.”
Pirani proposed several starting points for his argument:
1. Do things differently, such as more public transport compared to private vehicles, cutting waste in construction and industry and reducing throughputs of needless junk;
2. Change technological systems, such as insulating homes properly and getting off gas heating; and
3. Produce energy without burning fossil fuels.
Pirani argued that given nuclear power’s links to military uses, renewables “should be preferred”.
He also discussed the potential for decentralised renewable power generation, demand-side reduction and forms of common ownership.
Bottom–up transition needed
Fernandes discussed the contradictions around the energy transition in Latin America, particularly in Brazil.
Describing the devastating bushfires and flooding in the south of Brazil in May, displacing about 2 million people, she said that while the Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva government’s response to the disaster was better than the previous right-wing Jair Bolsonaro government’s would have been, the disasters still exposed the limitations of “centre-left class conciliation and class negotiation”.
This means that conversations around environmentalism, the energy transition and the broader ecological transition are appropriated by a “market-commodity approach”.
Fernandes is part of the Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South, formed in 2020, to “support a bottom-up ecosocial transition for Latin America”. Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Bolivia are involved.
The organisation’s platform promotes a critical understanding of the “decarbonisation consensus” process occurring across Latin America.
Fernandes also pointed to an article by Breno Bringel and Maristella Svampa, who argue in the International Sociological Association’s journal Global Dialogue that the aims of the decarbonisation consensus “do not include the deconcentration of the energy system, care for nature, or global climate justice, but other motivations such as attracting new financial incentives, reducing the energy dependence of some countries, expanding market niches or improving the image of companies”.
Furthermore, Bringel and Svampa argue that “Decarbonisation is not seen as part of a broader process of changing the metabolic profile of society (its patterns of production, consumption, circulation of goods, and waste generation) but as an end in itself” and “the ideology of indefinite economic growth is being maintained”.
Fernandes said the conversation around reducing fossil fuels is also influenced by “old-style left developmentalist thinking” that “the best way to secure sovereignty is by exploiting oil ourselves”.
This is a huge obstacle for ecosocialists trying to combat the argument that, if Brazil doesn’t extract the oil, “foreign companies will come and grab it for themselves and it will be privat[ised]”, or that royalties “can be used to finance the transition”.
“I don’t think they even believe it themselves,” Fernandes said, “because there are actually no plans in place to [do] … these two [things].
“If you’re for taking nuclear down or you’re for taking fossil fuels down, as more renewables are coming online, you need to have a plan for that; you need to have coordination.
“Right now [the government] doesn’t have … a plan for coordination … just easily digestible messaging for the media, like: ‘We will advance and we will be one of the last to stop drilling for oil because we need it, because we’re so behind, so we need it in order to finance the transition’.”
Regarding the energy transition in Brazil, Fernandes said Lula recently announced its “big energy transition plan”, with much ceremony, but that a lot of it is “focused on building infrastructure”.
The private sector is very interested in that, she said, and “is looking at the state as a way to de-risk its own investments”.
She said while the state “needs to abide by its commitments” on emissions reductions, starting to finance a transition — directly through subsidies or tax breaks, loans and financing schemes — allows private corporations to “use the state … to grab these resources and expand [their] portfolios”.
“That’s why a lot of the fossil fuel companies are becoming energy companies,” said Fernandes. This is accompanied by state-financed industry rebranding to make companies’ energy mix of oil, wind and green hydrogen look “clean and natural”.
“We should be arguing for de-risking from a different perspective. We should be putting de-risking and de-commodification together,” she said.
Fernandes said the big problem in any transition is that the “commodity consensus” is embedded in it. “It’s very easy to make the argument that we are ‘advancing’ — in transition terms — because everything has been reduced to decarbonisation.
“We have ‘carbon tunnel vision’: everything gets reduced to the unit of carbon, [that] carbon is what we should be removing or capturing from the atmosphere and [this leads to] geoengineering, techno fixes promoted by the fossil fuel industries.
“Or carbon is the way that we measure products that we’re going to be selling; it’s a way to get agribusiness to agree to some of the carbon laws; and it is the way of getting everybody involved so that we don’t have losses.
“When we’re talking about the environmental impacts of — for example — pollution, we are privatising profits and they are externalising all of the losses. So, the losses are coming onto the state and onto the people.”
Reflecting on the May floods, Fernandes said Brazil was not prepared for the number of people who lost their houses and livelihoods. There was no “national adaptation plan”, she said, the government instead pushing the idea that helping people only involved financing them for loss and damage.
Reparations
She said there is need for reparations, but that to do that properly requires that “we identify those who are responsible for the problem. Even that is not just a matter of “punishing them for their crimes”.
“If we understand that we are going through a phase of ecological collapse … then the laws that we have to identify something as a crime and to punish people — they become quite minimal.
She said “global ecocide” requires that the debates around the impact of human society under capitalism cannot just be slotted into a specific legal framework.
“Whenever we have an approach [regarding] reparations that is so dependent on pressing charges and relationship-specific body of laws … we’re always dealing with the ‘after-effect’ problem.
“If we have an approach that’s more tied to decommodifying, we go to go back to the big issue around property. It is not enough for us to own the oil if we’re just going to do what Shell does or we’re going to partner up with Shell and BP. State-owned companies, in many places, are responsible for ecocide."
Fernandes said the problem with reducing the transition to energy is that “it tends to isolate us from the effects and various impacts of our actions”. For instance, it is important to ensure “a transition in one place” is not done “at the expense of the livelihoods of people somewhere else”. The way we mine essential minerals, used by renewables, really does matter, she said, pointing to the use of the term “Sacrifice Zone”.
Social movements in Latin America use the term particularly in relation to extractivism. “In Chile, communities started demanding to be recognised as sacrifice zones, to the point that this became an official [classification].
“But now we're moving to the stage of ‘Green Sacrifice Zones’, because we’re not coordinating throughout the supply chain.”
When we’re asking to transition the jobs of workers in the automobile industry in the US, or in Germany, Fernandes said it should not just mean producing electric vehicles.
“It means moving them into the public transportation sector and also giving them opportunities to get out [through] training for other areas. It means going after the curriculum. Because how can we talk about transitioning the jobs of people in one sector if we’re still graduating people into the same sector in the same way?
“If we move people [around] and change the sector itself, then we’re not going to have the same burden that were having right now: going to the Congo, Chile, Argentina and other parts of the world, looking for lithium, cobalt, copper and many other types of strategic minerals to the transition."
Fernandes said things are now at the stage “where extractivism is moving to green extractivism” and the “cooperation” between the Global North and Global South is still falling into what she describes as “green colonialism”.
She cited Germany or France partnering with organisations in the Global South around “green hydrogen hubs”, but that, in the end, is about the Global North “grabbing territory” to produce renewable energy ostensibly for domestic consumption, but that can be exported elsewhere.
Any talk or plan for the transition has to include the justice element, Fernandes said, otherwise, it becomes “very easy for the commodity form and private property interests to determine the direction”.