Ecosocialism or barbarism

Words matter. Words can contain a universe of meanings that change and diverge over centuries. Words can condemn a person to death or set a person free. Words can also lose meaning and, on rare occasions, words can be replaced.

I’m about to now utter a phrase that may shock you, but please take a breath and hear me out. Socialism is dead. Yes, I said it, because someone had to. Socialism is dead.

But like any great truth, which the word socialism carried and nurtured throughout the centuries, a new avatar has risen to take its place. One that has absorbed these truths; community, shared resources, economic safety and security for all, a focus on our collective health, the security of having a home, and an understanding that free education is important to raising all of our standards.

These truths have survived because they are essential to human flourishing. But for too long they have been encased inside a word that has been trapped in the epoch of when it was forged. An epoch that is detached, disconnected or at best dispassionate about the world outside of the human experience, the living world.

Sadly, with the death of socialism, the path is no clearer regarding how we best proceed.

In 2024, we now face an existential crisis that, aside from a few visionaries, socialism did not consider. And for the past 20 years, it has become clear that the climate crisis will only ever be a caveat attached to the word ‘socialism’ and never a core part of its meaning.

This is because the climate crisis is constantly at odds with core parts of socialism that are not truths, but material preferences that made sense in the time they were forged, but were forged with such steel that they have become impossible to break down.

The belief that jobs come before all else, that growth is a universal good for the working class, and that the good life consists of a certain set of consumer metrics with no thought to the damage they may cause to the natural world and our life support systems. These beliefs have been hardwired into socialism through centuries of deprivation of the working class and they cannot, it seems, be rewired.

“Yes,” a socialist will say, “system change not climate change”. Tell a socialist of an environmental protest, and they will say “I will be there”, as long as they have nothing else on that day. Ask a socialist if they believe in man-made climate change and they will say “Yes, absolutely.”

But go to a socialist event, talk, protest or action. Listen to the speakers, look at the order that they have been placed in, listen to the Q&A’s, listen to the conversations before and after, listen to the future actions that socialists ask you to put into your diary.

Then ask yourself, where is the connection to ecology, the outrage of the loss of biodiversity, what is being said about the climate crisis, or the state of the world’s oceans?

Ask yourself, who spoke up for the living world? Who spoke about a just transition, an integrated transport system, retrofitting and building housing to Passivhaus standards?

Where were the discussions, conversations, passing comments, on a reimagined world where workers and the environment are so connected that it is almost impossible to separate them? Who was questioning the concept of economic growth? Or how we grow our food?

The answer is that they are either nowhere to be found, the last speaker in a line-up whose time has already over run, or at the back of the room saying something that socialists nod their heads too politely before instantly forgetting what was said.

This disconnect has to stop. I’ll say it again, socialism is dead. In 2024, socialism without ecology, biodiversity and the climate at its core is not a socialism that has any relevance for the people who are about to go through one of the greatest struggles in human history and it is certainly not fit for those that will come after.

On the current trajectory, climate change is about to unleash the most brutal form of fascism that we have ever seen, due to the limited food resources and shrinking land mass it will create, and we have to be ready.

So I implore all true socialists who understand that the material conditions of our reality are what should dictate our goals and strategies.

I ask you to now recognise this reality in order to help focus our minds to help us reconnect to the natural world that we have long since abandoned.I ask that from this day forth let us no longer declare that we are socialists, but to proudly proclaim that we are eco-socialists, and that we are ready to defend workers and the living world with everything that we have.

Adam Williams co-founded GND Media and co-hosts the Green New Deal podcast.

Feature image: Unsplash.