This month marks a year of my diving back into leftist politics after my first wave of disillusionment with the scene here just before the pandemic. I tried different orgs and modalities for expressing my principles, but eventually circled back to the same one I’d joined when I first moved here, with fresher eyes and a clearer sense of its strengths and limitations this time around.
I also had a better idea of what kind of project I wanted to contribute my (limited) energy towards. That project was “ecosocialism.”
It’s one of those words that can mean anything and nothing at the same time; over the past year, I’ve collected pamphlets from various left tendencies who all claim the term, though in 99% of the literature, stop short in their definitions at condemning “green capitalism” or qualifying that climate change is “capitalist-made,” not “man-made” in the abstract. That’s all well and good, but it’s far from satisfying. I’m pretty sure “capital = bad” is already a given in the last 9 letters of “ecosocialism.” It’s the prefix that we need to substantiate.
Bridging the gap between the book clubs that think very hard about what that “eco” part actually demands of socialists, and the socialist orgs that hand wave about the environment is, to my mind, one of the most important tasks for the movement today.
It’s ironic to be thinking about these things on the same day that House voted 285-98 to approve a MAGA-led resolution condemning the “horrors of socialism,” a mere hours before Mamdani is supposed to meet with Trump. According to POLITICO, “Eighty-six Democrats joined with Republicans to approve the measure. Two others voted present. No Republican voted to oppose it.” Hilarious.
The thing is, I too condemn the “horrors” of socialism just as I condemn the “horrors” of Christianity, because there is no denying that horrors have been unleashed in the name of both, but we don’t see the House voting on that. The Vatican officially repudiated the “Doctrine of Discovery” in a March 2023 statement, rejecting it as not part of the Catholic faith. Will the House of Representatives do the same?
What about the “horrors” of representative democracy? Hiroshima, Guantanamo Bay, and Gaza are top of mind, for me.
We obviously know that none of this is about any actual horrors; it’s the pathetic last gasp of a thoroughly discredited two-party system that no one but its pawns take seriously anymore.
Let them condemn all they want. It’s our job to keep our house in order though, separating the wheat from the chaff, and rejecting doctrines that were never part of our faith to begin with too. That’s another reason why ecosocialism is an important wedge issue in our movement.
“Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.” (Karl Marx)