Draft statement for Ecosocialism Conference 2024
Humanity faces a planetary emergency
2024 has witnessed a further acceleration in the environmental crisis. The environment humanity shares continues to be under attack on land, sea, and air by a global capitalist economy that requires constant accumulation and growth, irrespective of the cost to the natural world.
This is signalled by:
- Earth’s 13 straight months with a new average heat record to June 2024. The permanent rise in pre-industrial temperatures above 1.5C is now extremely likely.
- Peer-reviewed science confirming it is inevitable, due to the Antarctic ice melt, that rapidly warming global seas will rise by one metre by the end of this century and an additional further one metre for each of the four centuries following.
- Six of the nine planetary environmental boundaries continue to be breached, resulting in the chemical poisoning of the planet through fertilisers and ‘forever chemicals’ and a rapid increase in loss of both insect pollination and forests.
Capitalism cannot deliver a solution
November 2024 saw the re-election of Donald Trump as US President, a climate emergency denier, who said “drill, baby, drill’ at a closing election rally. It also saw the further degeneration of the COP process in Azerbaijan, whose president described the country’s natural gas as“a gift from God” to be brought to market. Petrostates tried to remove all reference to fossil fuels and the final financial agreement for poorer nations facing climate chaos was branded a ‘betrayal’ by many.
These events underscore that with polluting production and resource extraction as its bedrock, there is no evidence that the market economics, exploitation, and accumulation so essential to capitalism, can deliver a solution in the interests of all humanity.
As the climate crisis deepens, inefficient, ineffective, and profit-driven technological reforms will be promoted by governments and corporations. While offering some amelioration, these steps will only deepen global inequality and insecurity and fail to tackle the totality of the crisis.
Confronted by population movements and social struggles resulting from climate breakdown, governments across the globe will further strengthen borders and introduce repressive legislation to police the social turmoil.
A “just transition”
A market driven capitalist solution will harm workers and small farmers. Jobs in fossil fuel industries, agro-industries and large scale ranching will have to be drastically cut back in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Without massive state intervention, millions of workers will lose their jobs. Farming methods will have to change radically, imperilling the livelihoods of small farmers. Embittered workers and farmers will be used by the far right to undermine reforms.
Billions of people whose lives are being devastated by climate change will receive little help from capitalist governments and institutions. Most of the climate finance being offered to poor countries is in the form of loans. In the face of a global emergency, offers of loans to poor countries is little more than self serving cynicism.
We need an Ecosocialist movement and programme
There is an urgent need to build a movement with a programme to meet the climate emergency that offers an alternative to the chaos, inefficiency, inequality, and repression resulting from capitalist strategies.
At the heart of an ecosocialist programme is the democratic socialisation of industries and services and the equitable distribution of resources. This necessarily means replacing the domination of capital and its profiteering, which is directly contrary to the interest of humanity and the natural world it is part of, with ecosocialist democracies governed by the interests of the international working class and its allies. Ecosocialism is the only way we will achieve a post-scarcity world where our needs are met and we have an abundance of time, culture and human connection alongside housing, food and public amenities for all.
We urgently need emergency programmes to tackle the crisis we face. We need investment in public programmes to: replace fossil fuels with renewable energy; create cheap and reliable public transport; retrofit and renovate existing housing stock; end the supply of ultra-processed foods poisoning our bodies; radically reduce deforestation; and implement radical measures to clean the oceans, seas, and rivers.
Ensuring a just transition and investing in clean energy will require many trillions of dollars. Governments of wealthy countries are politically unwilling to find this amount of money through conventional institutions. It is clear that we need a massive redistribution of wealth and power away from the large global corporations and the world’s very wealthy individuals if we’re going to finance our response to the climate catastrophe.
The Ecosocialist challenge is global
There is no national solution to this crisis. Fighting the ecocide that threatens humanity is a global task that will require the ending of the market economy and the social and economic inequalities it creates, the dismantling of imperialism and its five centuries-long exploitation of the planet, the abolition of borders, militarism, and policing, and the social transformation of the economy from the ground up.
Ecosocialism should aspire to be an international revolutionary movement that challenges the existing capitalist world order by offering a socialist, democratically planned, and egalitarian programme to meet the environmental crisis that humanity faces.
Revolutionary change means being active
Ecosocialists need to be active in the worker’s movement and environmental movement. Active in the trade unions, communities, and in social movements most impacted by the climate crisis. In particular, this means solidarity with refugees and immigrants and those forced to move as climate conditions make their lives impossible.
Ecosocialists need to fight for reforms in the here and now and always point to a future better world by offering a programme that intends to lead to it, while challenging the idea that capitalism and nature can peacefully coexist.
We welcome people who want to join us to help develop this campaign and expand its activities. We want to transform the ideas and theories of ecosocialism into practical action. We might not agree on every slogan or theory but we need to build a mass movement in a spirit of unity and hope.
Our proposed plans
1. Work towards the goal of helping to develop the organising strength of ecosocialism, both locally and internationally. With Trump in the White House we face an even faster acceleration of biosphere breakdown. A focal point will be COP30 (Belém, Brazil) coming up late 2025. There are plans for big protests and we should spend the next 12 months helping to make the case for massive action around November 2025. We will promote and organise for major events like London Climate Action Week 2025 which will take place from the 21st to the 29th June 2025.
2. Work with the Climate Justice Coalition on mobilisations across Britain and the Global Ecosocialist Network to coordinate internationally. And all other organisations committed to building an inclusive ecosocialist movement.
3. Organise a regular meeting online under the Ecosocialism Conference banner with any individuals and left groups that might be interested to help coordinate ecosocialist strategy and activity.
4. Provide resources for people to organise their own local events (help produce leaflets, provide a speaker etc) to promote ecosocialism, engage new activists and form the basis for a wider network in the future.
5. Focus on trade union conferences next year, getting them committed to backing the COP30 protests, green transition (this will be a fight particularly in Unite and GMB who organise workers involved in the fossil fuel industry). We will liaise with other activists in the union, for instance the Unite Grassroots Climate network, to coordinate this.
6. Improve the website to have more regular articles and keep promoting it, encouraging well known people to write for it as well.