For a decade, we have experienced two major waves of global popular revolts: from 2010, the Arab Spring and the major revolts against austerity in Western Europe and North America, including our Maple Spring. From 2019, a second wave manifests itself in the global mobilization of youth against climate change, popular struggles against the right in South America and the important anti-racist movement of Black Lives Matter in the United States. Nowadays, the public discussion on the left is no longer about the absence of popular resistance to neoliberalism, but rather about the strategic means so that these revolts can lead to real systemic transformations.
ideas in review
The current situation leads us to center the debate on the question of strategy, that is to say on the political struggle for an ecological and liberating socialism. Not that the theoretical and programmatic exploration of this new society is over. Not that the mortgage attached to the term “socialism” after the failures of the 20e century be lifted. There is still much to do on all these issues.
However, the debate has become a practical question, a question of struggles on the ground, because ecosocialist initiatives are multiplying.
In 2012, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, then candidate of the Left Front in the French presidential election, proposed to link ecological struggles and social struggles in a vision of rupture with capitalism and productivism in order to promote ecological and democratic planning. He called this new synthesis of socialism and ecology “ecosocialism” and incorporated it into his electoral program. In 2017, he did it again by publishing a brochure, The era of the people, which he ends with an eloquent call to ecosocialism. In 2022, Mélenchon won 22% of the votes in the presidential election and, at the head of a left-wing alliance, a remarkable score of 26% in the legislative elections. In place of choice on the program: ecological and democratic planning, inherited from the ecosocialist programs of previous years.
In 2019, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of the Democratic Socialists of America launched the Green New Deal (GND), which quickly became the flagship demand of the new American socialist left. This anti-neoliberal claim can link social and climate struggles and prefigure ecosocialism. Naomi Klein will not be mistaken: she affirms in her book On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal that the GND proposed by the young American socialists expresses the aspiration to an ecosocialist and democratic vision, at the antipodes of the old industrial and autocratic socialism of the Soviet Union.
Social movements are no exception. While in 2011, the more left claimed that it was necessary to “change the system, not the climate”, the idea is becoming clearer today with an assumed anti-capitalism often followed by a call for eco-socialism.
The student strike movement launched by young activist Greta Thunberg in the fall of 2019 mobilized six million participants around the world, including a monster demonstration of 500,000 people in Montreal. Since then, Greta and her Fridays for Future movement have consistently radicalized their positions with explicit denunciations of capitalism, colonialism and racism.
Ecosocialist ideas often have an ancient root in popular struggles in the Global South. Thus, in Brazil, the ecosocialist influence is felt in social movements such as the Movement of the Landless, in the movements for the territorial rights of indigenous peoples, as well as in political parties such as the PSOL (Partido Socialismo e freedom). In South Africa, ecosocialist ideas have been developing since 2011 and are expressed today in a vast convergence, the Climate Justice Charter, which militates against green capitalism and for a democratic and popular transition.
The need for a global alternative to capitalism is obvious. The UN and IPCC scientists are sounding the alarm and warning that transformations are urgent if we want to avoid the irreparable. The question of the hour: the ecological and social transition.
Far from being choosy about this issue, which some consider to be a compromise with the supporters of the system, we see it on the contrary as an opportunity to reaffirm the need for an anti-systemic transition and to transform this perspective into a mobilizing demand on the ground. class and popular struggles. More than ever, a unifying and democratic ecosocialism is necessary.
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