Eco Socialism – conjunction of ecological and socialist perspectives

Pritam
Singh | Professor at Oxford Brookes University

Eco-socialist
perspective on modern capitalism is a creative conjunction
of two perspectives that have both commonalities as well as differences. The
socialist perspective without ecological dimension amounts to productivism and
is not a fundamental critique of the capitalism’s nature destroying character.
The worst form of this productivist socialism was/is Stalinism. The ecological
perspective without the socialist dimension fails to capture the fundamental
cause of environmental destruction
which is
profit maximising imperative of
capitalism. There are some ecologists who think of the possibility of green
capitalism in which, it is argued, that market incentives could be used to
change the behaviour of capitalist firms and
consumers to environmentally-friendly objectives. Eco-socialists perspective is
not opposed to green reforms in capitalism and, in fact, struggles for such
reforms because eco-socialists consider that green capitalism is a better basis
to build green socialism than a non-green capitalism can be. This critical
approach to green reforms in capitalism is similar to socialists struggling for
democratic reforms in capitalism in the belief that a democratised capitalist
society is a better foundation for building a democratic socialist society. But
there are limits to ecological reorientation of capitalism because of its
profit-oriented character in the same way as there are limits to democratic
reforms in capitalism because of the class based nature of democracy in
capitalism.

Therefore, a consistent
ecological perspective would always visualise that a true eco-friendly economy
and society can be built only by replacing capitalism with a class less
society.