Ecosocialism

Ricardo Cueva Fernández

Eco-socialism is a relatively recent term in the history of political thought. Its roots lie in the work of the famous nineteenth-century figure William Morris (1834–1896), although he was known more as an artist than as a political activist. However, it seems that it was Karl Marx who laid certain critical foundations for humanity’s understanding of nature, through the notion of ‘metabolism’ (see Social Metabolism). Marx had already touched on this idea in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844: ‘that man lives from nature means that nature is his body, with which he must maintain a continuous process in order not to die’ (1844, p. 112). He would continue to emphasise this point in his Grundrisse (1857–58, I, p. 449) and in Capital (1867, I, p. 215).

In any case, the link between socialism and ecology can be easily traced in the writings of Manuel Sacristán in Spain and in the ‘eco-socialist’ current within the German ‘Greens’ around 1980 (Die Grüne, in Riechmann, 2012, p. 32), as well as in the social movements of the 1960s, particularly pacifist movements involved in highly specific struggles of that decade. This does not imply that Marxism was absent from these movements. In fact, the terms ‘eco-Marxism’ and ‘ecological Marxism’ have been used to designate a more specific group of authors and works centred on broadly similar tenets, which initially revolved around J. O’Connor and the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism, founded in 1988.

Marx had argued that the expansion of the productive forces, paving the way for socialism, could generate such abundance that, at a later stage, law and the state would become unnecessary (Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875, pp. 16–17, pp. 24–26). This placed the German author and his closest followers firmly in an anti-Malthusian position (see Social Darwinism), aimed at unmasking the political economy of those presumed to defend bourgeois interests. But Malthus appeared to stage a comeback from those criticisms as early as the 1960s, thanks to Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) and, above all, the MIT report commissioned by the group of scientists and politicians who had formed the Club of Rome in 1968, completed in 1972 (The Limits to Growth). Indeed, the Ehrlichs argued that the cause of the problems was in fact overpopulation (1968, p. xi), which would also contribute to global warming and mass famines (1968, p. 5).

In the same vein of pessimism, authors such as Herman Daly, drawing on the work of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, began to raise the possibility of adopting a steady-state economic model (Daly, 1974, p. 17), an idea that had its roots in the work of John Stuart Mill (Arenas, 2025). This solution stemmed from accepting the principle of entropy, or the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the transformation of energy leads to its degradation, thereby highlighting the irreversible nature of the conversion of heat into mechanical work. Accordingly, the risk faced by open systems, such as ecosystems, was that of losing resources through the extraction of supplies linked to industrial production (Daly, 1974, p. 20).

Barry S. Commoner, however, rejected the notion that the ecological problem lays in overpopulation and emphasised instead on the inappropriate use of technology in production (Commoner, 2012, p. 103), pioneering the outlines of a perspective that combined science and emancipation. He formulated four laws that justified a radical shift in policy and distanced him from neo-Malthusianism: 1) everything that makes up the ecosphere is interrelated, operating as a complex network of numerous connections; 2) everything on the planet follows some sort of path, with cycles of matter and energy, where the latter is degraded and cannot be recovered; 3) ‘nature’ is the result of billions of years of evolution, meaning that living beings and the chemical composition of the ecosphere reflect limits that severely restrict their range of variation (‘nature knows what it is doing’); 4) all food production entails some sort of cost, creating a ‘debt’ to nature (Commoner, 1975, p. 21), as any extraction that occurs must subsequently be replaced (1971, pp. 33–45). Furthermore, the author of At Peace with the Planet advocated the redistribution and sharing of global environmental costs (see Eco-social justice). Commoner was aware that this burden was one to which some countries contributed more than others (Commoner, 1971, pp. 151 and 247) and that, within a single country, the wealthiest contributed more than the rest (Ecology and Social Action, 1973, in Commoner, 2012, pp. 107 and 108).

In any case, this early socialist variant of environmentalism, to which Commoner contributed insights and proposals, identified the problem of discordant cycles, already foreshadowed by Marx in 1867 in Capital (1867, Vol. III, p. 1034). Marx had observed that large-scale land ownership was reducing the agricultural population, while the industrial population was constantly growing and becoming overcrowded in the cities. John Bellamy Foster, one of the most seasoned proponents of this current at the end of the last century, somewhat later than Commoner, proposed the notion of the ‘metabolic rift’ (Foster, 2000, p. 15) to highlight a phenomenon inherent to capitalism with calamitous environmental consequences (see Social Metabolism).

Although these attempts to reclaim Marx for the cause of ecology have produced results that are far from negligible, the term ‘eco-socialism’, championed by Löwy and Kovel in their 2001 International Eco-Socialist Manifesto (later reiterated in the Declaration they spearheaded in 2015, as well as at the Social Forum in Brazil), retains greater unifying power in political terms. It even ties in well with more specifically ecofeminist proposals, such as that of Ariel Salleh (2024) (see Ecofeminism). The 2001 document (in Löwy, 2011, pp. 137–141), endorsed by numerous intellectuals and significant in scope due to the anti-globalisation struggles of the time, set out such clear demands as the rejection of globalisation as an extension of the imperialist phenomenon (p. 137), the defence of the planet’s ecological balance (p. 138) and, above all, socialism as a system superior to capitalism, provided it avoided emulating capitalism’s productivist objectives (p. 139). These points, together with the elimination of dependence on fossil fuels, the internationalism implicit in the programme itself and the defence of use-value over exchange-value (p. 150), define the main tenets of eco-socialism.

The next challenge for the eco-socialist movement, in relation to the final objective of the Manifesto, has been to identify the basic needs that should be met, on the basis of egalitarian criteria, while acknowledging the limits of planetary capacity. Indeed, Engel-Di Mauro (2024) traces the origin of the term ‘degrowth’ (see Degrowth) precisely to that document. Fernández Buey had stated, several years ago, that ‘sustainable degrowth’ was based on the use of renewable energy sources (solar, wind and, to a lesser extent, biomass or plant-based energy and hydropower) and on a drastic reduction in energy consumption, so that the fossil fuels currently in use “would be restricted to survival or medical purposes” (in Riechmann, 2012, p. 22). In the same work, Riechmann referred to the idea of ‘development without growth’ (2012, p. 86). In any case, the type of economic model proposed to intervene and bring about this containment of consumption aims to avoid authoritarian approaches (Engel-Di Mauro, 2024, pp. 68–70), such as the Soviet experience and similar models. However, authors such as Kohei Saito advocate definitive control of the means of production by the workers (2020, pp. 246–247), while others such as Vetesse and Pendergrass (2022, p. 36) or Huber (2024, p. 20) also advocate centralised intervention. Furthermore, in the case of the aforementioned John Bellamy Foster, the proposed policy is that of ‘planned degrowth’ (Foster, 2023).

In conclusion, we might say that eco-socialism is linked to two main concerns. Firstly, a profound critique of capitalism as a thoroughly destructive and wasteful economic and social system, in contrast to other, more or less reformist political theories that seek to preserve the model of accumulation or merely modify it in part. Secondly, the attempt to identify the agent of change, thereby seeking to pinpoint the sources of discontent with the system and the resulting potential for upheaval that could break down hegemonic social relations. However, within this second framework, it is worth distinguishing between two distinct, though not antagonistic, approaches. On the one hand, there is a perspective that demands drastic paradigm shifts based on a new relationship between humankind and nature and which, therefore, would pursue a new ‘morality’. On the other hand, there is a perspective that relies on a revolution emerging from the fundamental contradiction between capital and labour, in line with the customary perspective of the historically organised labour movement.

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