Ecosocialism and Degrowth in the Anthropocene

by Peter Boyle

A statement issued by hundreds of scientists and others at the Global Tipping Points Conference, held at the University of Exeter on June 30-July 3 began with this rim prediction: “Global warming is projected to exceed 1.5°C within a few years, placing humanity in the danger zone where multiple climate tipping points pose catastrophic risks to billions of people.”

Current warming, the statement explained, has activated “irreversible changes and every fraction of additional warming dramatically increases the risk of triggering further damaging tipping point.” If this assessment is correct, any significant revolutionary change that takes place this century will have to do so amid catastrophic global climate change.

Academic discourses on the global situation speak of “multi-crises,” but this is just a belated recognition of something that should have been observed decades ago. Political, social, economic and environmental crises are now deeply interlinked. The brutal and horrific genocide in Gaza is at the top of our minds today but equally horrific genocides continue to play out in Sudan and large swathes of sub-Saharan Africa.

All this is perhaps most stark in sub-Saharan Africa, where famine is more often the only harvest of the land. But in other parts of the world catastrophic floods, wildfires and mega storms are accentuating already severe political, social and economic crises and driving mass displacement. Countries such as Indonesia and Nigeria are political tinderboxes, capable of exploding into political revolt at any time, as we have seen. Significant parts of the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America can also be described this same way.

In all these cases, the key elements of a revolutionary situation, as described by Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, are either at play or coming into play. The ruling classes are increasingly unable to rule in the old way and the exploited classes are unable to live in the old way.

But Lenin also pointed out that not every revolutionary situation leads to revolution. If a conscious revolutionary force has not developed its own organisation and earned enough political authority among working people, then revolts will be defeated or at best result in a change of elites.

Right-wing populism

All classes that are conscious of their interests are now making moves to protect them in this period of intensifying crisis. Today, the ruling capitalist class is most conscious of its situation; the lower working classes remain in a state of uncertainty, division and confusion.

The political responses from growing sections of the billionaire class makes it clear that they are increasingly unable to rule in the old way and therefore lurching to right populism. We see this all around the world.

United States President Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement have their own bizarre characteristics, accentuated by messaging on social media and Trump’s narcissistic and often bizarre statements. But the issues around which this right-wing populist movement was built — racism, sexism and anti-immigrant/refugee mobilisation — are common to rising right-populist movements in Europe and here in Australia.

Anti-refugee attacks are a key mobilising factor for these movements, as the numbers of people displaced by war, repression and insecurity in the Global South grows. Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” policy and the refusal of other major fossil-fuel exporting countries to stop their climate-destroying behaviour will only ensure the global refugee crisis worsens. This includes Australia, the world’s second biggest exporter of carbon pollution, which has plans to continue expanding mega fossil fuel mining projects.

The peer-reviewed 2025 Production Gap Report confirmed that governments collectively plan to produce more than double the amount of fossil fuels than would be consistent with achieving the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C or 2°C. Consequently, even more people in the Global South will be forced to make the perilous attempts to get to relative safety in the Global North.

Most will only make it to neighbouring countries in the Global South with capacities to support their peoples already stretched to the limit. The growing refugee crisis will be politically exploited by Trump and other right-wing populist governments, making it a vicious cycle.

The political ground for today’s right-wing populist movements was laid by the traditional parties of government in the imperialist countries — including the old social democratic parties — through four decades of neoliberalism, which cut real wages, worsened working conditions, reduced job security and slashed social services and welfare.

These parties also targeted refugees. In Australia, for instance, Labor governments deployed policies of indefinite imprisonment-without-trial and deportation against refugees well before Trump tried to bring them in.

The traditional parties of government in the imperialist countries also fuelled racism and Islamophobia to legitimise their wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, and their war drive against China. Those and subsequent wars also turbocharged the refugee crisis.

Backed by billionaires

A growing sense of anger and disillusionment with traditional politicians was seized as an opening by billionaire-backed right-wing populist politicians, either within old parties or newer ones.

Billionaires have many ways to secretly channel funds and political support to political movements and their leaders. Undoubtedly, there is a lot of this going on unseen today.

But with Trump’s second election, more billionaires have come out to openly support him. Not just US billionaires, but also European, South American and Australian billionaires. The richest person in Australia, Gina Rinehart, proudly supports Trump and Trumpism, as do others.

Zionists supporting the genocide in Gaza have also funded far-right groups. In Australia, the family trust of Jillian Segal, the Labor-appointed Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, is a major funder of far-right campaigns.

All this is evidence that more sections of the ruling class are now preparing the grounds to rule in a “new way”. So, what is happening on our side of the class divide?

Here the situation is grim. The working masses in most countries are angry, frustrated and dissatisfied, but also confused and divided over where their interests really lie. In addition, the trade union movement is weaker than it has been for a long time and its leaders are conservative and often politically compromised.

In Australia, we got a sense of this on August 31, as tens of thousands marched in a series of racist March For Australia demonstrations, which focused on anti-immigration demands but also raised explicit white supremacist politics. In the biggest cities, these marches were led by contingents of black-clad neo-Nazis belonging to the relatively small but growing National Socialist Network (NSN).

These thugs assaulted several people in Melbourne and, after the march, launched a violent attack on the First Nations’-led Camp Sovereignty, hospitalising a number of First Nations women activists. In Sydney, some people returning from a simultaneous and peaceful Palestine solidarity and anti-racist march (which drew about 4000 people) were assaulted on a train by racists who had come from the March For Australia.

The far-right took heart from this response and called for a further round of racist marches on September 16.

Material basis for racism

Long ago, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Lenin identified the material basis for racism and chauvinism in the working class in imperialist countries. It rests on the relatively better off conditions of workers in the Global North, which the ruling classes use to promote the idea that workers have more in common with them than workers in the Global South.

Lenin also spotlighted the culpability of social democratic party leaders in selling this poison to the working class. The history of the labour movement in imperialist countries is replete with proof of this criminal betrayal. In Australia, the bulk of trade union leaders (who are totally enmeshed with the capitalist Labor party and aspire to graduate to a cushy Labor parliamentary seat) have failed to stand up to Labor and the Coalition’s anti-refugee and pro-war policies.

Over the past two years, the trade union movement and the Labor party (with a few exceptions) were notably absent as a huge Palestine solidarity movement grew through numerous mass mobilisations — including the 300,000-strong march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the 350,000 Nationwide March For Palestine.

Rather, Labor governments engaged in several attempts to suppress this movement, falsely accusing it of antisemitism. At the same time, they excused Israel’s genocide and continued to supplying it with arms and weapons components. They have been complicit in genocide and fuelling racism.

Most political parties condemned the March For Australia, but Labor PM Anthony Albanese shamefully said there were “good people” at those protests. This was an ugly echo of Trump’s defence of the 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, when he said they included “some very fine people”.

Imperialism

What does this tell us about the intersections and intermeshing of the crises that are shaping the Anthropocene? Jason Hickel, in a thread on X hit the spot when he said:

“Imperialism and racism are central to the capitalist world economy. The barbarism is a feature, not a bug.

“Imperialism is not a side-gig, not an over-reach committed by greedy individuals, it is a structural feature of the capitalist world economy.

“Beginning in the long 16th century, the regions of what today we call the global South were forcibly integrated into the Europe-centred capitalist world economy as providers of cheapened labour, resources and goods. This was an extraordinarily violent process, involving colonization, dispossession, mass enslavement, and genocide.

“How could anyone possibly justify these horrors? Race. Discourses of white supremacy and racial hierarchy were fabricated by the European ruling classes to dehumanize the majority world, hiving them off from the realm of rights, to provide the ideological scaffolding necessary to justify apocalyptic levels of exploitation and bloodshed in the periphery.

“And of course these very same discourses were deployed within the core itself, to justify paying lower wages to racialised people, and to deny them equal access to resources.

“Racial ideology was promoted so aggressively that it developed its own momentum of hatred and violence.

“Racism, like imperialism itself, is not a side-show to capitalism but a structurally necessary feature of it. It is not a standalone problem that can be addressed with a few liberal reforms here and there. It has always been central to capitalism and it remains that way today.

“Overcoming capitalism — in other words, transitioning to a democratic socialist economy — is ultimately necessary to end structural racism and imperialist violence.

“The struggle against racism must be anti-capitalist, and the struggle against capitalism must be anti-racist”.

Greenwashing

One of the political consequences of the enmeshment of the struggles against ecocide, racism, misogyny and imperialism and for working class living conditions, is that it is harder to sustain old-school “environmentalism” as a viable response to the overall crisis of the Anthropocene.

In their desperation to lobby established institutions of capitalist power to prove there is a win-win solution to the crisis for the capitalist class and the rest of us, many environmental NGOs have become tools of the greenwashing schemes of sections of the capitalist class.

They have ended up lowering their expectations to fit in with dodgy “net-zero” carbon emissions targets, which in Australia’s case somehow shows “progress” despite actual rises in emissions from most sectors (mining, transport, manufacturing and construction).

It is true that sections of the capitalist class see opportunities to profit from the transition to renewable energy, especially now that technology has made it cheaper than energy from fossil fuel and nuclear energy. But the ways they seek to harness this shift prioritises their ability to profit from it.

So, rather than properly harnessing solar energy in ways that could address social needs such as housing and secure jobs — through programs such as the mass construction of ecologically sustainable public housing — capitalists come up with schemes such as building giant solar farms in the remote north and laying an underwater cable to sell electricity to Southeast Asian markets.

They come up with plans that depend on continuing the grossly unequal relations between the rich imperialist states of the Global North and those of the Global South — relations which are part of the climate emergency.

Capitalism

Addressing a conference in Havana, Cuba, last year Hickel said:

“We call it the Anthropocene, but we must be clear: it is not humans as such that are causing this crisis. Ecological breakdown is being driven by the capitalist economic system, and — like capitalism itself — is strongly characterised by colonial dynamics.

“This is clear when it comes to climate change. The countries of the global North are responsible for around 90% of all cumulative emissions in excess of the safe planetary boundary — in other words, the emissions that are driving climate breakdown. By contrast the global South, by which I mean all of Asia, Africa and Latin America, are together responsible for only about 10%, and in fact most global South countries remain within their fair shares of the planetary boundary and have therefore not contributed to the crisis at all.

“And yet, the overwhelming majority of the impacts of climate breakdown are set to affect the territories of the global South, and indeed this is already happening. The South suffers 80‒90% of the economic costs and damages inflicted by climate breakdown, and around 99% of all climate-related deaths. It would be difficult to overstate the scale of this injustice. With present policy, we are headed for around 3⁰C of global warming. At this level some 2 billion people across the tropics will be exposed to extreme heat and substantially increased mortality risk; droughts will destabilise agricultural systems and lead to multi-breadbasket failures; and hundreds of millions of people will be displaced from their homes.

“Climate breakdown is a process of atmospheric colonisation. The atmosphere is a shared commons, on which all of us depend for our existence, and the core economies have appropriated it for their own enrichment, with devastating consequences for all of life on Earth, which are playing out along colonial lines. For the global South in particular, this crisis is existential and it must be stopped.”

Hickel is obviously right on this. Through their own actual experience, climate activists around the world are also coming to similar conclusions.

Revolutionary degrowth

Like Japanese Marxist Kohei Saito, Hickel is an anti-capitalist proponent of degrowth as a necessary step to address the climate emergency. But where Hickel goes further than Saito is that he has drawn out the global and anti-imperialist nature of the struggle to address the climate emergency (and the more broader multi-crises).

Hickel’s argument is that it is not just reliance on fossil fuels that imperils the planet, but capitalism’s chronic pursuit of economic growth. Unlimited growth means more demand for energy. And more energy demand makes it more difficult to develop sufficient capacity for generating renewable energy in the short time left to avert catastrophic warming.

Ultimately, this is because, as Hickel says, “while it’s possible to transition to 100 percent renewable energy, we cannot do it fast enough to stay under 1.5°C or 2°C if we continue to grow the global economy at existing rates.”

We need a planned and purposeful reorganisation of the global economy to benefit the vast majority of people and to do that we have to overthrow capitalism. Growth for growth’s sake has to be abandoned, and addressing global inequality requires significant adjustments.

Some leftists criticise Hickel saying he does not tell us how to overthrow capitalism. But who really has the complete recipe to do that? No one.

Others criticise him for only putting forward demands on governments. But that is the bread and butter of the practical struggles that we are all engage in. Our objective, as revolutionary ecosocialists, is to independently mobilise the working class in progressive struggles as the best way to educate and empower the only class with the potential to overthrow capitalism.

Others argue that we have to reject degrowth because it will never be popular with the working class under capitalism. It is true that it may not be a popular slogan, but it is still something that needs to be explained by revolutionary socialists, much like imperialism and racism.

Arguing against economism, Lenin wrote in What Is To Be Done? that revolutionaries have a duty to go beyond immediate struggles between workers and bosses to explain the broader problems with capitalism and draw the working class into struggles against all oppressions.

The working class is already beginning to rebel against the capitalists’ demand for more economic growth and productivity, which only serves to make them even richer.

Whether it is in movements to defend the environment from rapacious mining companies, to movements against the growing arms industry, to the battle for housing, education and other social needs, the question is posed: economy for who and for what? For profits or for the common good?

Reprinted from Climate and Capitalism.