12.19.08
Ecosocialist declaration
RG mail
[1]http://links.org.au/node/803
The following Declaration was prepared by a committee elected for this
purpose at the Paris Ecosocialist Conference of 2007 (Ian Angus, Joel
Kovel, Michael Löwy), with the help of Danielle Follett. It will be
distributed at the World Social Forum in Belem, Brazil, in January
2009.
To add your name to the list of signatories who support the analysis
and political perspectives set forth in this statement, email your
name and country of residence to [2]ecosocialism@gmail.com, or visit
[3]www.ecosocialistnetwork.org/.
——————–
The Belem Ecosocialist Declaration
The world is suffering from a fever due to climate change,
and the disease is the capitalist development model.
Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, September 2007
Humanitys choice
Humanity today faces a stark choice: ecosocialism or barbarism.
We need no more proof of the barbarity of capitalism, the parasitical
system that exploits humanity and nature alike. Its sole motor is the
imperative toward profit and thus the need for constant growth. It
wastefully creates unnecessary products, squandering the environments
limited resources and returning to it only toxins and pollutants.
Under capitalism, the only measure of success is how much more is sold
every day, every week, every year involving the creation of vast
quantities of products that are directly harmful to both humans and
nature, commodities that cannot be produced without spreading disease,
destroying the forests that produce the oxygen we breathe, demolishing
ecosystems, and treating our water, air and soil like sewers for the
disposal of industrial waste.
Capitalisms need for growth exists on every level, from the individual
enterprise to the system as a whole. The insatiable hunger of
corporations is facilitated by imperialist expansion in search of ever
greater access to natural resources, cheap labor and new markets.
Capitalism has always been ecologically destructive, but in our
lifetimes these assaults on the earth have accelerated. Quantitative
change is giving way to qualitative transformation, bringing the world
to a tipping point, to the edge of disaster. A growing body of
scientific research has identified many ways in which small
temperature increases could trigger irreversible, runaway effects such
as rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet or the release of methane
buried in permafrost and beneath the ocean that would make
catastrophic climate change inevitable.
Left unchecked, global warming will have devastating effects on human,
animal and plant life. Crop yields will drop drastically, leading to
famine on a broad scale. Hundreds of millions of people will be
displaced by droughts in some areas and by rising ocean levels in
others. Chaotic, unpredictable weather will become the norm. Air,
water and soil will be poisoned. Epidemics of malaria, cholera and
even deadlier diseases will hit the poorest and most vulnerable
members of every society.
The impact of the ecological crisis is felt most severely by those
whose lives have already been ravaged by imperialism in Asia, Africa,
and Latin America, and indigenous peoples everywhere are especially
vulnerable. Environmental destruction and climate change constitute an
act of aggression by the rich against the poor.
Ecological devastation, resulting from the insatiable need to increase
profits, is not an accidental feature of capitalism: it is built into
the systems DNA and cannot be reformed away. Profit-oriented
production only considers a short-term horizon in its investment
decisions, and cannot take into account the long-term health and
stability of the environment. Infinite economic expansion is
incompatible with finite and fragile ecosystems, but the capitalist
economic system cannot tolerate limits on growth; its constant need to
expand will subvert any limits that might be imposed in the name of
sustainable development. Thus the inherently unstable capitalist
system cannot regulate its own activity, much less overcome the crises
caused by its chaotic and parasitical growth, because to do so would
require setting limits upon accumulation an unacceptable option for a
system predicated upon the rule: Grow or Die!
If capitalism remains the dominant social order, the best we can
expect is unbearable climate conditions, an intensification of social
crises and the spread of the most barbaric forms of class rule, as the
imperialist powers fight among themselves and with the global south
for continued control of the worlds diminishing resources.
At worst, human life may not survive.
Capitalist strategies for change
There is no lack of proposed strategies for contending with ecological
ruin, including the crisis of global warming looming as a result of
the reckless increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The great
majority of these strategies share one common feature: they are
devised by and on behalf of the dominant global system, capitalism.
It is no surprise that the dominant global system which is responsible
for the ecological crisis also sets the terms of the debate about this
crisis, for capital commands the means of production of knowledge, as
much as that of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Accordingly, its
politicians, bureaucrats, economists and professors send forth an
endless stream of proposals, all variations on the theme that the
worlds ecological damage can be repaired without disruption of market
mechanisms and of the system of accumulation that commands the world
economy.
But a person cannot serve two masters the integrity of the earth and
the profitability of capitalism. One must be abandoned, and history
leaves little question about the allegiances of the vast majority of
policy-makers. There is every reason, therefore, to radically doubt
the capacity of established measures to check the slide to ecological
catastrophe.
And indeed, beyond a cosmetic veneer, the reforms over the past
thirty-five years have been a monstrous failure. Isolated improvements
do of course occur, but they are inevitably overwhelmed and swept away
by the ruthless expansion of the system and the chaotic character of
its production.
One example demonstrates the failure: in the first four years of the
21st Century, global carbon emissions were nearly three times as great
per annum as those of the decade of the 1990s, despite the appearance
of the Kyoto Protocols in 1997.
Kyoto employs two devices: the Cap and Trade system of trading
pollution credits to achieve certain reductions in emissions, and
projects in the global south the so-called Clean Development
Mechanisms to offset emissions in the highly industrialized nations.
These instruments all rely upon market mechanisms, which means, first
of all, that atmospheric carbon dioxide becomes a commodity under the
control of the same interests that created global warming. Polluters
are not compelled to reduce their carbon emissions, but allowed to use
their power over money to control the carbon market for their own
ends, which include the devastating exploration for yet more
carbon-based fuels. Nor is there a limit to the amount of emission
credits which can be issued by compliant governments.
Since verification and evaluation of results are impossible, the Kyoto
regime is not only incapable of controlling emissions, it also
provides ample opportunities for evasion and fraud of all kinds. As
even the Wall Street Journal put it in March, 2007, emissions trading
“would make money for some very large corporations, but dont believe
for a minute that this charade would do much about global warming.”
The Bali climate meetings in 2007 opened the way for even greater
abuses in the period ahead. Bali avoided any mention of the goals for
drastic carbon reduction put forth by the best climate science (90% by
2050); it abandoned the peoples of the global south to the mercy of
capital by giving jurisdiction over the process to the World Bank; and
made offsetting of carbon pollution even easier.
In order to affirm and sustain our human future, a revolutionary
transformation is needed, where all particular struggles take part in
a greater struggle against capital itself. This larger struggle cannot
remain merely negative and anti-capitalist. It must announce and build
a different kind of society, and this is ecosocialism.
The ecosocialist alternative
The ecosocialist movement aims to stop and to reverse the disastrous
process of global warming in particular and of capitalist ecocide in
general, and to construct a radical and practical alternative to the
capitalist system. Ecosocialism is grounded in a transformed economy
founded on the non-monetary values of social justice and ecological
balance. It criticizes both capitalist market ecology and productivist
socialism, which ignored the earths equilibrium and limits. It
redefines the path and goal of socialism within an ecological and
democratic framework.
Ecosocialism involves a revolutionary social transformation, which
will imply the limitation of growth and the transformation of needs by
a profound shift away from quantitative and toward qualitative
economic criteria, an emphasis on use-value instead of exchange-value.
These aims require both democratic decision-making in the economic
sphere, enabling society to collectively define its goals of
investment and production, and the collectivization of the means of
production. Only collective decision-making and ownership of
production can offer the longer-term perspective that is necessary for
the balance and sustainability of our social and natural systems.
The rejection of productivism and the shift away from quantitative and
toward qualitative economic criteria involve rethinking the nature and
goals of production and economic activity in general. Essential
creative, non-productive and reproductive human activities, such as
householding, child-rearing, care, child and adult education, and the
arts, will be key values in an ecosocialist economy.
Clean air and water and fertile soil, as well as universal access to
chemical-free food and renewable, non-polluting energy sources, are
basic human and natural rights defended by ecosocialism. Far from
being despotic, collective policy-making on the local, regional,
national and international levels amounts to societys exercise of
communal freedom and responsibility. This freedom of decision
constitutes a liberation from the alienating economic laws of the
growth-oriented capitalist system.
To avoid global warming and other dangers threatening human and
ecological survival, entire sectors of industry and agriculture must
be suppressed, reduced, or restructured and others must be developed,
while providing full employment for all. Such a radical transformation
is impossible without collective control of the means of production
and democratic planning of production and exchange. Democratic
decisions on investment and technological development must replace
control by capitalist enterprises, investors and banks, in order to
serve the long-term horizon of societys and natures common good.
The most oppressed elements of human society, the poor and indigenous
peoples, must take full part in the ecosocialist revolution, in order
to revitalize ecologically sustainable traditions and give voice to
those whom the capitalist system cannot hear. Because the peoples of
the global south and the poor in general are the first victims of
capitalist destruction, their struggles and demands will help define
the contours of the ecologically and economically sustainable society
in creation. Similarly, gender equality is integral to ecosocialism,
and womens movements have been among the most active and vocal
opponents of capitalist oppression. Other potential agents of
ecosocialist revolutionary change exist in all societies.
Such a process cannot begin without a revolutionary transformation of
social and political structures based on the active support, by the
majority of the population, of an ecosocialist program. The struggle
of labour workers, farmers, the landless and the unemployed for social
justice is inseparable from the struggle for environmental justice.
Capitalism, socially and ecologically exploitative and polluting, is
the enemy of nature and of labour alike.
Ecosocialism proposes radical transformations in:
the energy system, by replacing carbon-based fuels and biofuels with
clean sources of power under community control: wind, geothermal,
wave, and above all, solar power.
the transportation system, by drastically reducing the use of private
trucks and cars, replacing them with free and efficient public
transportation;
present patterns of production, consumption, and building, which are
based on waste, inbuilt obsolescence, competition and pollution, by
producing only sustainable and recyclable goods and developing green
architecture;
food production and distribution, by defending local food sovereignty
as far as this is possible, eliminating polluting industrial
agribusinesses, creating sustainable agro-ecosystems and working
actively to renew soil fertility.
To theorize and to work toward realizing the goal of green socialism
does not mean that we should not also fight for concrete and urgent
reforms right now. Without any illusions about clean capitalism, we
must work to impose on the powers that be governments, corporations,
international institutions some elementary but essential immediate
changes:
* drastic and enforceable reduction in the emission of greenhouse
gases,
* development of clean energy sources,
* provision of an extensive free public transportation system,
* progressive replacement of trucks by trains,
* creation of pollution clean-up programs,
* elimination of nuclear energy, and war spending.
These and similar demands are at the heart of the agenda of the Global
Justice movement and the World Social Forums, which have promoted,
since Seattle in 1999, the convergence of social and environmental
movements in a common struggle against the capitalist system.
Environmental devastation will not be stopped in conference rooms and
treaty negotiations: only mass action can make a difference. Urban and
rural workers, peoples of the global south and indigenous peoples
everywhere are at the forefront of this struggle against environmental
and social injustice, fighting exploitative and polluting
multinationals, poisonous and disenfranchising agribusinesses,
invasive genetically modified seeds, biofuels that only aggravate the
current food crisis. We must further these social-environmental
movements and build solidarity between anticapitalist ecological
mobilizations in the North and the South.
This Ecosocialist Declaration is a call to action. The entrenched
ruling classes are powerful, yet the capitalist system reveals itself
every day more financially and ideologically bankrupt, unable to
overcome the economic, ecological, social, food and other crises it
engenders. And the forces of radical opposition are alive and vital.
On all levels, local, regional and international, we are fighting to
create an alternative system based in social and ecological justice.
References
Visible links
1. http://links.org.au/node/803
2. mailto:ecosocialism@gmail.com?subject=Add%20my%20Signature%20to%20Belem%20Declaration
3. http://www.ecosocialistnetwork.org/
Hidden links:
4. mailto:ecosocialism@gmail.com?subject=Add%20my%20Signature%20to%20Belem%20Declaration