> On Mar 15, 2026, at 18:11, David Walters via groups.io > <[email protected]> wrote: > > Mark, I look forward to your response
Well, it turned out to be a longer critique of the USFI Manifesto, https://links.org.au/manifesto-ecosocialist-revolution-break-capitalist-growth USFI Manifesto Marxmail and the Global Ecosocialist Network hosted a forum in 2023 called "A Roadmap to Ecosocialism." “Roadmap" seems to be a good metaphor for a transitional program to guide working-class struggle to a socialist destination. Transitional demands seek outcomes that make working people stronger and capital weaker. It is a program of class struggle: Winning relief for the masses while mobilizing them, building working-class organization, class consciousness, and growing the movement for future struggles. Unfortunately, we have had no success in forcing a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. The “climate movement” lacks class struggle goals, strategies, tactics, and demands. These are needed to target capital, mobilize masses of people, maximizes our power against billionaires, their institutions, and their nation states while we win critical environmental reforms. To this end, the USFI has published a “Manifesto for an ecosocialist revolution — Break with capitalist growth.” The Manifesto describes "an anticapitalist transitional program." Like Trotsky's Transitional Program of 1938, the Manifesto is a "bridge between present demands and the socialist programme of the revolution. It aspires to be a system of transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class; the aim being to lead social struggles towards the conquest of power by the proletariat" [1]. Unlike Trotsky's Transitional Program, however, the Manifesto uses the "economic degrowth" concept. Marxist degrowth is a theoretical framework that some want to apply to environmental struggle [3], while others don't [4]. Marxist degrowth starts with Marx’s observation that capitalism requires continual growth in the surplus between what it costs to produce a commodity and the sale price of that commodity. Capitalist growth never stops or else the capitalist system stops. This entails unbounded growth in raw-material inputs and emission outputs. Among other results, it tells socialists that it is impossible for us to produce our way out of global warming and ecological destruction. The Manifesto presents a vision of a world based on this concept. The Manifesto’s Vision The Manifesto authors "... imagine what a good life would be for everyone, everywhere, while reducing the consumption of matter and energy, taking into account differentiated responsibilities, and therefore reducing material production. It is not a question of giving a ready-made model, but of daring to think of another world, a world that makes us want to fight to build it by breaking with capitalism and productivism." USFI’s vision is of plenty for all and justly shared in a socialist world of production for human need, protection of natural resources and social justice. Planned economies in the USSR and China, however, have produced mass famines and the destruction of what was once the world’s largest inland sea. To be honest, socialists can only prove that replacing capitalism is a NECESSARY condition to stop environmental destruction. We cannot prove that a socialist revolution is SUFFICIENT for meeting our ecological, social-justice, and other goals today and in the future. The Manifesto assumes too much about a future, post-capitalist world. And it decides too much for the future self-emancipated working classes. Rather than a program of struggle, the Manifesto presents a policy platform on such topics as nuclear power, open borders, reducing the purchasing power of the rich, and ending fast fashion. This enumeration obscures which of the demands are truly transitional and crucial to struggle. Transitional Policies versus Transitional Demands For example, the Manifesto writes that ecosocialism "... raises the flag of extending rights and freedoms: right of association, of demonstration, right to strike; free election of parliamentary bodies in a multi-party system; a ban on private financing of political parties; legalization of popular initiative referendums; abolition of non-democratic institutions (such as an autonomous Central Bank); prohibition of private ownership of major means of communication; abolition of censorship; a fight against corruption; dissolution of militias serving leaders; respect for the rights and territories of indigenous communities and other oppressed peoples, etc." Some demands in this list are qualitatively different from the others. Freedom of speech, assembly, and association are qualitatively different from other freedoms: Free speech is needed to win the other freedoms. Workers’ civil rights were won in past bourgeois democratic revolutions and struggles. These rights are foundational to working-class development. One of the earliest disagreements among US American communists, for example, was public versus secret operation. That matter was settled with the help of the early Comintern, which taught that working-class development depends on free speech and assembly for organization, education, economic actions, and mass political activity. The Manifesto, however, mixes that which is crucial for struggle with a platform of policies, many of which might be demands, but not necessarily transitional demands. And it is quite easy to get overwhelmed by the many demands, alternatives, and policies in the Manifesto. Its method takes the union of the “ecosocialist, antiracist, antimilitarist, anti-imperialist, anticolonialist and feminist” movements rather than their intersection, that which is common to them all. The importance of freedom of speech, assembly, and organization are common to all movements. So is global warming. Global Warming The Manifesto calls to “Socialize energy and finance without compensation or buyback to get out of fossil fuels and nuclear power as quickly as possible.” This demand is one of about twenty under the section “Main lines of an ecosocialist alternative to capitalist growth.” “Socializing energy” is about global warming, which is arguably the greatest contradiction faced by world capitalism today. Global warming shows that capitalism can do nothing else but produce its way to destruction of the planet for humans and for other species. This is one result of ecosocialist theory: According to Malm and Carton, true remediation of global warming entails stranding more than $12-15 trillion (thousand billion) in worldwide fossil fuel assets; that would cause a drastic drop in the valuation of those companies, their banks, and the financial industry. The authors note that the total value of the human beings freed by the Emancipation Proclamation was less than this (in present-day dollars). And so was the total value of capital expropriated by the Russian Revolution. Both resulted in devastating civil wars. This estimated value of oil and gas assets that need to be stranded to reduce greenhouse gas is multiple times more than capital destroyed worldwide in the 2008 crisis [5]. Global warming affects everyone, but the working class is footing the bill by paying hundreds of billions of dollars to cope with the dramatic increase in extreme weather disasters. The needed upgrades to utilities, transportation and communication infrastructure more than doubles the yearly cost. It is working people and poor people, moreover, who suffer the worst tribulations of global warming. All the while, fossil capital reaps historically-high profits. Thus, a transitional demand to “socialize energy” is to demand that fossil-fuel companies pay for global warming. The IPCC was unable to get fossil capitalists, their bankers, and their governments to accept a worldwide reduction in fossil-fuel consumption. In addition to stranding trillions of dollars of assets, fossil capital will not accept the expropriation of their profits to pay for the damage they have done. They will not admit to doing any damage. Oil and gas companies have taken their governments to war, killed millions of people, overthrown governments and will certainly seek to destroy any movement of activists demanding their surplus. The struggle against fossil capital challenges the most powerful and murderous sector of the class. Their capitalization, by the way, is an order of magnitude larger than the nuclear industry. Regardless of how one feels about nuclear power, it is fossil capital that is directly to blame for global-warming damage. This damage accumulates each year. The global warming crisis is upon us, and people are searching for answers. This makes fossil capital a much better target than nuclear in a transitional ecosocialist program. The International Nature of Transitional Demands Against Fossil Capital The current struggle against fossil capital unfolds worldwide as local, regional, and sometimes indigenous efforts to stop specific fossil-fuel projects. In the US Pacific Northwest, for example, local and regional movements have stopped most of investments in coal, coal, gas, LNG, and oil terminal ports from trans-shipment to Asia. Similar efforts are being happening in various forms around the world. These local and regional efforts are up against global corporations. Bringing together the nationwide and worldwide opposition to fossil capital can better assemble the massive numbers of people to counter their power. We also must attract the fossil-fuel industry workforce and unions. National and global unification is the way we can focus and mobilize win against a powerful, centralized industry of just a couple of dozen major corporations. Those of us in oil-producing nations are better positioned to fight fossil capital. We could raise, for example, the transitional demand to expropriate fossil profits and apply them to offset the effects of greenhouse-gas emissions. That would set the precedent of forcing companies to pay for the true costs of production. Victory would be a step towards the Manifesto’s demand to socialize energy. Its success would depend on how the unions and other industry workers support de-commodification of their products. It’s hard to imagine socializing an industry without the workers involved in running that industry. First and foremost, a socialized oil and gas industry would need to leave oil and gas reserves in the ground, and off the “asset” side of the corporate ledger, if we are to address the IPCC goals on reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. This is one, hypothetical approach to reduce commodity production without winning an ideological struggle against “productivism” first. “Productivism” and “Consumerism” The Manifesto, claims “Satisfying real social needs while respecting ecological constraints is only possible by breaking with the productivist and consumerist logic of capitalism” [1]. If there is such a thing as “anti-productivist” struggle, however, it is among those who study and apply Marxist analysis to ecology. The Manifesto drags this by the hair into the arena of mass struggle. The Manifesto sees “anti-productivist struggles” where others might see efforts to protect water, assert indigenous land rights, stop LNG expansion, or to protect neighborhood home prices. Few argue today in favor of reducing overall productive activity. And they don’t need to: We want masses of working people to develop class consciousness, which comes from struggle, first and foremost. Concrete demands like “Take Big Oil’s Profits” are better suited to mass struggle than abstract concepts like “Break with Productivism.” The latter could be directed at almost anyone in a nation where the vast majority of people must work to survive. But the former target is very clear. The call to “break with consumerism” is also poorly targeted and not a class struggle demand. Simon Pirani has noted “...that it is social, economic and technological systems that consume resources, that individuals do so through those systems and that there is no direct, arithmetic correlation between their consumption and environmental impacts” [6]. Instead of focusing on the institutions, the Manifesto focus is on individual consumers: “First steps include drastically reducing the purchasing power of the rich, abandoning fast fashion, advertisement and luxury production/consumption (cruises, yachts and private jets or helicopters, space tourism, etc.), scaling down mass-produced meat and dairy and ending the accelerated obsolescence of products, extending their lifespan and facilitating their repair.” It’s not explained how we get the ultra rich to stop spending their money. But rather than telling working people what socialists want to take from them, we should present a plan to empower the working masses so they can decide instead of capital what is to be produced and how. “Degrowth” Working people generally understand that they need to be productive to get paid. They need to consume commodities in order to survive. And when the economy is in a recession or depression, it’s because the economy is no longer growing. As John Molyneux wrote, “Degrowth under capitalism is a disaster for working class people. It means, in reality, a recession with all the unemployment and suffering that involves. This ‘difficulty’ cannot be evaded by saying what we want is ‘democratically planned degrowth’ or some such. Planned degrowth under capitalism, with the capitalist class still in power, is impossible. And even small steps towards degrowth will hit working class people, however we dress it up.” In many ways, USFI’s Manifesto “puts the cart before the horse.” It puts a struggle against capitalist lifestyles ahead of a struggle against the capitalist class. [1] https://links.org.au/manifesto-ecosocialist-revolution-break-capitalist-growth [2] https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/transprogram.pdf [3] https://rupture.ie/articles/necessity-degrowth [4] https://rupture.ie/articles/degrowth-a-response [5] https://ivavalleybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/overshoot_Andreas-Malm-2024-.pdf [5] https://www.climatecentral.org/climate-matters/billion-dollar-disasters-2025 [6] https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/25937 -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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