By Jeremy Dewar
The Ecosocialism 2024 conference will take place on 7 December at London South Bank University. Anti*Capitalist Resistance, a British observer organisation to the Fourth International (USFI), is the driving force behind the conference. And therefore, it is likely that the ideas in the ACR’s recent pamphlet Ecosocialist revolution: a manifesto will be prominent at it.
The comrades are to be congratulated for organising the conference, without which there would be virtually no gathering of ecologists and socialists in Britain this year. This is despite the fact that we have just witnessed the two hottest years in history and the passing of the recognised tipping point of 1.5C of global temperatures above the pre-industrial average. At the same time, COP 29 and the Plastic Waste conference have demonstrated the uselessness of expecting the great pollution producing states to reform themselves. An urgent call to arms to the forces who can take action is therefore necessary.
The manifesto, which was adopted by an ACR conference in June, demands an ‘alternative to the destruction of capital… based on the collective democratic power of producers and consumers… in a sustainable relationship to other life forms and the environment’. It calls this new society ‘ecosocialism’.
The pamphlet provides a number of useful facts, e.g. carbon capture and storage technology (CCS) would take 340 years to remove the CO2 emitted in seven years by just one oil company. It clearly illustrates the interlocking threat to the environment posed by capitalism, e.g. the covid pandemic, pollution, drought and famine, and the breaching of six of the nine ‘planetary boundaries’ whose destructive feedback loops threaten disaster for humanity and the natural world as we know it.
The manifesto also gives a useful summary of how capitalist political economy, driven by the profit motive, is inherently destructive of the environment and incapable of the rational, cooperative planning needed to tackle the climate crisis. It critiques the inadequacies of ‘green capitalism’, its ‘New Deals’ and the cynical lies behind ‘greenwashing’, exposing the utopian idea that the world can transition to a ‘clean, green’ economy while preserving the colonial relations of exploitation that plunder the global south to prop up living standards in the north.
Reform and revolution
The climate crisis means that the choice of ‘socialism or barbarism’ is posed more acutely than ever since it was first posed by Rosa Luxemburg in the midst of the horrors of WW1.
The manifesto clearly denounces reforms and illustrates the need to transform the relations of production bequeathed to us by capitalism.
The manifesto correctly critiques the reformism of the Labour party and trade union leaders, who are ‘integrated into capitalism’ and ‘seek to reform it’ but are themselves ‘reformed’ and turned into ‘neutered organisations obedient to capital’.
The limits imposed by the straitjacket of capitalism and the world’s division into rival nation states dominated by imperialist powers have been amply demonstrated by the farcical degeneration of the COP process.
In noting their rejection of ‘the old productivism of 20th century Stalinism and Social Democracy’, that is, production for production’s sake, the manifesto goes on to observe that we cannot ‘simply lay hold of the readymade economic machinery and use it for socialism’.
This is the basis for the need for democratic socialist planning to be based on real workers’ democracy embodied in a workers’ state, to avoid the disaster of the bureaucratic planning in the USSR and other states like Cuba or North Korea where capitalism has been suppressed, but the working class deprived of political power by a bureaucratic caste.
There is a critique of so-called ‘degrowth theory’ which argues that the developed world (and the world in general) produces and consumes too much and sustainability can only be achieved and maintained by shrinking our economies, but, as Fourth International theorist Michael Löwy points out, this ‘does not define what kind of society will replace the present system’ and tends to ‘ignore the issue of capitalism’.
The manifesto is right to observe that the foundations of the entire capitalist economy are geared towards accumulating profit for competing capitalists and their blocs and nations. This is the basis of overaccumulation, waste, want and economic crisis. The socialised economy (i.e. one based on common ownership of the means of production and the suppression of the law of value), will have to start with the forces of production, and their methods of organisation and integration, bequeathed to us by capitalism.
The manifesto asserts that we cannot ‘simply lay hold of the readymade economic machinery and use it for socialism’. This is a revision of Marx’s famous observation that the working class cannot ‘simply lay hold of the readymade state machinery and wield it for its own purposes’.
The working class and the oppressed will have to start the building of socialism with the ‘readymade economic machinery’: the factories, banks, the supermarkets chains that they can take from the capitalists. They cannot invent completely new forces of production. For huge swathes of humanity, billions of people living without adequate housing, energy, jobs, sanitation, medicine, etc., the urgent need is for growth, an increase in the useful products they need.
Of course, the working class will rapidly transform the forces of production during a period of transition, starting with the most destructive parts of those forces, like fossil fuels and single use plastics. But they cannot simply dismantle them; after all, the working class, or more abstractly, human labour, is one of the forces of production. The problem lies with the relations of production, the rule of a tiny handful of property owners, who exploit for their profit the mass of propertyless labourers.
Since the capitalists cannot give up their control without a fight, and in any case, since capitalism cannot abandon or suppress the logic of competition and accumulation, ‘reform’ whether led by market-mechanisms or otherwise, is rendered utopian when faced with the scale of the task posed by climate breakdown.
State and revolution
But, if the existing relations of production undoubtedly have to be transformed, that is inconceivable without a struggle to control them. As Marx pointed out after the first experience of working class power in the Paris commune, ‘‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.’
The manifesto devotes considerable attention to the need for a ‘new form’ of democracy, bridging the artificial gap between ‘politics’, ‘the economy’ and social life.
So, while the comrades emphasise the centrality of the working class and the trade unions to a struggle for a radically different model of social relations, and pose the need for an ‘ecosocialist International to unite revolutionary forces globally as part of a strategy to combat international capitalism’, the reader searches in vain for a strategy—an interlinked system of slogans, tactics and organisations of struggle—by which this ‘ecosocialist revolution’ is to be carried out.
While they rightly give short shrift to the undemocratic concept of Citizens’ Assemblies, promoted by Extinction Rebellion, they insert in its place the idea of ‘forums… rooted in our communities and workplaces [that] need political power… to socialise property and take over businesses and banks’.
It continues: ‘We favour a mass movement coordinated internationally that struggles for immediate reforms but also looks to a different kind of world.’
But it is the relationship between that future model of organisation and the present organisation of the class struggle that is filled with a void.
How can we ensure that the ideas that win out in such forums go beyond reforming capitalism? How can they be organised to prevent them becoming bureaucratic obstacles to the movement? And how are the forums to impose their will against the state machinery that would fight, arms in hand, to defend the capitalists’ property and wealth?
It does go on to note:
‘The capitalist state (in our case Parliament or the devolved legislatures) as it exists is incapable of implementing the transformative anticapitalist plan required’ and that, ‘we need a new kind political power, based on a mass popular participatory democracy that we are fighting for in the existing social movements and workers’ struggles… We challenge the ‘sovereignty’ of Parliament and seek to replace it with more direct democracy in workplaces and communities.’
But the capitalist state is not just parliament. Marxists argue that in the final analysis the state consists of ‘special bodies of armed men’ (Engels), which need to be confronted in a forcible revolution. This analysis presents all revolutionaries who wish to overthrow this rule and replace it with the rule of the working class, through what revolutionary communists call workers’ councils (soviets), but which this manifesto prefers to call ‘democratic forums’, with the fundamental question: how can we take the working class from today’s struggles to the ‘smashing of the state’?
This question is not only not answered, it is not even posed.
This is illustrated most clearly as we come to the end of the document, where an ‘Emergency Plan’ to address the climate crisis is outlined.
This consists of a list of measures that the future ‘movement’ should fight for, such as ‘socialisation of the land’, ‘a universal basic income’ and ‘higher wages and better social security for everyone’, and notes that these would only be possible ‘when large parts of the economy have been socialised, removed from the private sector and begun to be organised under a plan for society based on participatory democracy.’
What kind of government could carry out such measures? How would it overcome the resistance of the capitalists and their state? Extinction Rebellion has failed to persuade the bosses to surrender their control over environmental policy to ‘Citizens’ Assemblies’—how will the working class get them to surrender control to ‘participatory democracy’?
What is missing is a transitional programme of interlocking demands—for rank and file control of the unions, workers’ control of production, etc.—leaving the maximum demand for ‘political power’ completely disconnected from the day-to-day struggle for reforms within the system.
It is exactly this question, how to lead the working class to the overthrow of capitalist property relations, that the manifesto does not answer.
So, while the manifesto acknowledges the need for a ‘revolution’ to get rid of capitalism, it does so formalistically, in the abstract, without demonstrating the why and the how.
Instead, we are left with an abstract call for forums, that can be the basis of a future post-capitalist government. But the whole history of such bodies shows that a) they emerge out of, and must be argued for within, the immediate need to organise struggles TODAY, and b) that they do not themselves, spontaneously, take on the tasks of the revolutionary insurrection, the expropriation of the capitalists, and the suppression of the counter-revolution. For that, a revolutionary communist party and International, and a workers’ militia is needed.
In the meantime, we are encouraged to make do with the struggle for radical reforms. In their own words, since the fight to keep the average global temperature below 1.5C is ‘already effectively missed’ now we must fight to keep it ‘below 2C’. Unfortunately 1.5C was not a figure plucked from mid-air; it is a tipping point after which feedback loops turbocharge climate change.
In short, we don’t have time for eco-reformism. The fact that revolutionary forces are today too small to lead the struggle to stop the destruction of the planet should only intensify our efforts to develop a concrete programme of action among the working class and the oppressed people of the global south.
That programme should present a strategy for overcoming the bureaucratic obstacles of the reformist organisations, and the military and political resistance of the state. At its heart must be the call for organisations of workers’ control that can lead to workers’ councils, militia and the planned economy necessary to confront the climate crisis and put an end to the war, oppression and anarchy of capitalism. It is necessary for revolutionaries to say all of this now, to link the full revolutionary strategy with immediate questions, because it is in the struggles of today that the forms of working class power tomorrow are generated. That is the actuality of the revolution.
Marxists, more exactly, centrists, who obscure the sharp edge of their revolutionary programme in favour of reforms, simply because they are not already popular in the ecological movement, do not help, but hinder this struggle.
