Towards Eco-Socialism: A World in Transition

Introduction

The world is convulsing with crises: poverty, imperialist wars, rising fascism, and accelerating ecological breakdown. These are all symptoms of capitalism, a social system that organises society around profit rather than the satisfaction of human needs.

Today, it is technologically possible to ensure good lives for all and a habitable planet for generations to come. But to do this, we must break from capitalism. Reforming this cruel system will not do, nor can we merely cultivate small, isolated alternatives. Instead, our task is to build a different social system that centres human flourishing and ecological stability. In other words, we must build eco-socialism.

The many real-existing socialist projects of the past century, including the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Burkina Faso, and Venezuela, offer a legacy of revolutionary experience from which today’s movements can and must draw lessons. These countries demonstrate both the possibilities that emerge when capital’s control is challenged and production is organised around human needs and the contradictions that arise during this process.

This brief sketches a vision of the primary stage of eco-socialism in the Global North, organised around three pillars of transition: democratisation, decommodification, and decolonisation. This vision is neither a blueprint nor an endpoint. Rather, it should serve as an active framework to orient and motivate our struggle.

Democratise the Means of Production

Under capitalism, the ruling class determines what is produced, how workplaces are organised, and how wealth is distributed in society. Working-class people are excluded from the process of making these decisions, even though they impact our lives immensely. Capitalist society is therefore, fundamentally, anti-democratic. We live under the dictatorship of capital.

Eco-socialism is based on the opposite premise: the people should collectively govern the means of production and the wealth they produce.^a This is real democracy, where the world’s majority assert control over the economy and all institutions that shape everyday life.

This can only be done at scale through state power, which affords the working class the capacity to democratise the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy. Major industries (e.g. steel, construction, pharmaceuticals), finance, energy, transport, communications, and other important productive assets are expropriated and brought under social ownership.

With key assets in public hands, the working class can plan production around social and ecological needs rather than profit maximisation. This allows us to ensure that everyone has access to a decent and purposeful job, as profit-driven forms of employment are eliminated and labour is redirected towards socially necessary work, like agriculture, ecological restoration, and care work.

The control over land, the most foundational means of production, must likewise be reorganised through a programme of eco-socialist agrarian reform. Land is owned and stewarded communally, with more localised agroecological farming enhancing food sovereignty and restoring ecosystems. The state prioritises investment in public services in smaller communities and provides people, especially those who have been historically disenfranchised from land ownership, access to land and meaningful employment in land stewardship. This helps make life outside major cities more materially viable and socially desirable. Rather than concentrating productive activity and human populations in ever-expanding cities, we can build more balanced settlement patterns, where people have flourishing relationships with the land and with one another. In doing so, we can overcome the widespread social alienation that capitalism gives rise to.

Democratising the economy is contingent on a struggle to democratise the state itself. The state as we know it – the capitalist state – largely serves to protect the anti-democratic social relations that capitalism relies on: private property rights, poor labour and environmental regulations (i.e. the conditions for profitability), the violent repression of resistance, etc.

Democratising the state requires a party of the working class winning power and transforming the very essence of the state.^b This includes dismantling institutions that enforce capitalist class power, such as the military, while expanding the administrative capacities that support communities and ecosystems, such as public education and socialised healthcare. New initiatives must also be introduced, such as a national jobs programme for ecological restoration. To execute state functions, community representatives are directly elected to the state at various levels of government, paid an equal living wage, and subject to strict recall procedures and term limits.

Practically, social ownership can take many different forms, balancing central coordination and decentralised decision-making. Resources and industries that cannot be planned in isolation, i.e. the aforementioned commanding heights, ought to be publicly owned and planned at a national or in some cases even international level.

At the same time, people should be able to exercise as much direct control as possible over the institutions and productive resources that affect their lives. Things like regional food systems, housing construction, and education can be managed by workers and communities themselves. This localised production should be organised according to locally determined needs while operating within wider social, ecological, and economic plans.

The commune is a form of democratic organisation in which communities are organised into local institutions that manage socially owned resources. At the same time, they coordinate with regional and national institutions that are responsible for broader development objectives.

Constructing eco-socialism relies on what Chilean Marxist Marta Harnecker identified as popular protagonism.¹¹ To cultivate it, people must engage in popular struggle and establish institutions through which they can collectively govern social life and production. Beyond communes, these could include workers’ committees, tenants and communal councils, and public-commons partnerships. Their exact form and function will differ according to the society and moment in which they emerge, yet their purpose is the same: to empower people to actively determine how society is organised.

Democratisation ultimately serves to advance human development, expanding people's capacity to collectively shape the conditions of their own existence.

Decommodify the Means of Survival

Under capitalism, life’s essentials are commodified. To access the means of survival (i.e. housing, food, energy, etc.), people must sell their labour power to capitalists in exchange for a wage.^c Today, billions of people rely on the market for survival, with almost half the global population living on less than $8.30 per day.^12,d

This dependence on wage labour and commodity markets is historically distinctive to capitalism. While humanity has lived under many forms of exploitation throughout history, in most societies, people maintained some customary access to the means of survival. Through the process of primitive accumulation, capitalism severed people’s direct relationship with the things necessary to ensure their own subsistence, with land being, far and above, the most important.^e

However, under eco-socialism, things work differently. With production and distribution decisions subject to democratic control, the following needs are decommodified:

Energy: Zero-carbon energy becomes a universal basic service. The energy system is rapidly electrified and expanded through a supergrid combining large-scale solar and wind with local, community-owned renewable energy. Critical minerals, including lithium, nickel, and cobalt, are sourced through just supply chains, respecting labour rights, Indigenous sovereignty, and ecological limits. A mass retrofit campaign insulates homes and installs ground-source heat pumps.

An immediate moratorium is placed on all new fossil fuel projects. Existing fossil fuel companies are nationalised, allowing their workers and infrastructure to be reorganised as part of the eco-socialist transition. Fossil fuel production and consumption is rapidly phased out in line with a 1.5°C decarbonisation pathway and workers retool fossil infrastructure into a public utility of carbon waste management, sucking carbon out of the air and safely storing it underground.

Transport: Private transport companies, including automotive manufacturers and airlines, are brought under public ownership and reorganised around social and ecological needs. Public transport is massively expanded, electrified, and made accessible to all, providing a viable alternative to private car ownership.

Light rail, metro, bus, cycle infrastructure, and pedestrian routes are rolled out en masse. Regional public transport is free. Mass aviation is phased out and replaced by high-speed rail for continental travel and passenger ships for intercontinental travel.

Education: Free, high-quality education from preschool through university is guaranteed for all. Competitive, bureaucratised capitalist education systems are replaced with liberatory pedagogies focused on human development and social needs. Trade schools are fully funded to upskill an eco-socialist workforce.

Places of education are treated as vital institutions of social reproduction, with robust mental health care, nutritious meals, ample time for play, emotional intelligence programmes, and connection with nature integrated into all curricula.

Food: The corporate food system is dismantled and reorganised around meeting human needs rather than profit. Everyone is guaranteed access to nutritious and delicious food through a network of collectively organised agroecological farms, food distribution schemes, and community canteens.

Housing: Everyone is guaranteed more than just a shelter, but a home – a comfortable space to rest and be with loved ones. Priority is placed on redistributing second homes and underused housing, and on mass retrofit, rather than resource-intensive new builds.

Housing is organised to provide adequate private space while encouraging communal forms of living that bring people of different generations and walks of life together, with shared kitchens, gardens, childcare and recreation areas, and community spaces. Regular participation in collective life helps combat the social isolation of capitalist society.

Healthcare: Healthcare is a public service, provided free at the point of use. Health services are expanded to appropriately address both physical and mental health, including the widespread alienation and anxiety produced by capitalism. Greater emphasis is placed on preventative care and addressing the social and environmental conditions that produce ill health, including poverty, poor housing, pollution, unhealthy work, and social isolation.

Areas often neglected or stigmatised by for-profit healthcare systems are appropriately accounted for, including trans and gender-affirming healthcare, elder care, reproductive healthcare and abortion, disability services, and addiction treatment.

Technology: Technology and communication infrastructure are developed as social goods. High-speed internet as well as telecommunications and digital infrastructure are universally accessible. Media and communication platforms are democratically governed. Publicly funded innovations are freely shared rather than enclosed as private property.

Automation and artificial intelligence are strategically deployed within ecological boundaries to reduce socially necessary labour and improve working conditions. This helps to increase the time people have at their disposal for care, learning, leisure, and political participation. Technological development is integrated into democratic planning, prioritising renewable energy, medicine, agroecological farming, and ecological restoration.

Decolonise the Economy, Society, and Nature

Imperialism and colonialism have structured the world around the appropriation of labour, resources, and land in the Global South for the benefit of the Global North.^f This has produced centuries of unequal development and concentrated enormous wealth in the hands of the ruling classes, first and foremost, of imperialist countries.

Eco-socialism therefore cannot be built without confronting the imperial relations that shape our world. We must decolonise the economy, society, and nature.

I. Economy

Building eco-socialism requires transforming the economic relationships between countries. In other words, we must dismantle the imperial division of labour through which wealth and productive capacity have been concentrated in the Global North at the expense of the South.

Debt and Reparations: Illegitimate debts are cancelled, freeing countries of the Global South from debt burdens that constrain their ability to invest in socio-ecological development. Grant-based ecological reparations and development transfers are provided according to historical responsibility, recognising the Global North’s vastly disproportionate contribution to climate breakdown and the wealth it has accumulated through centuries of unequal exchange.^g

Production and Trade: Production is localised where possible, and international trade is reorganised around mutual development. Countries exchange resources, goods, and knowledge according to collectively determined needs. The goal is not to isolate countries from one another, but to build an international economy in which every society has the material capacity to meet the needs of its people without impoverishing others or exhausting their ecosystems.

Technology Transfer: Intellectual property barriers on essential technologies are dismantled. Renewable energy, agricultural, medical, and other technologies necessary for the mitigation of and adaptation to climate breakdown, as well as human development more generally, are freely shared. Scientific knowledge and publicly funded research are treated as a global commons.

II. Society

Police and Prisons: The capitalist state has developed extensive institutions of coercion to defend existing property relations and suppress challenges to ruling-class power. Under eco-socialism, these institutions must be transformed to serve the interests of the working and oppressed majority.

This does not mean abandoning collective security or imagining that violence will disappear overnight. An eco-socialist society must be capable of protecting people from violence, organised crime, and counter-revolution, while simultaneously addressing the social conditions that reproduce harm. The police and prison systems inherited from capitalism are progressively transformed and ultimately replaced as their functions are assumed by democratic institutions.

Punishment and confinement give way, wherever possible, to prevention, rehabilitation, and transformative justice. Secure institutions remain necessary for people who pose a serious threat to others, but their purpose is protection and rehabilitation rather than retribution. As conditions that produce harm, including poverty, homelessness, and untreated illness, are systematically reduced, the necessity for coercive institutions likewise diminishes.

Borders: Migrant justice is central to reckoning with the long history of colonialism. The influx of migrants displaced by ecological breakdown and imperialist violence are welcomed and offered full social rights, including a home, healthcare, education, and dignified work. Migrant workers have the same labour rights and protections as everyone else, removing the ability of employers to use immigration status to suppress wages and undermine working conditions.

In the long term, reparations to the Global South, the development of its productive capacity, and the cessation of imperialist violence create the conditions for people to remain and thrive in their own communities if they wish. As the material inequalities that make migration a necessity for survival are dismantled, borders lose their coercive and exclusionary function.

Military: The imperial military apparatus of the Global North is dismantled. Foreign military bases are closed, nuclear arsenals are dismantled, and imperialist military alliances are dissolved. Military resources and productive capacity are redirected towards social provisioning, ecological restoration, and adaptation to climate breakdown.

International solidarity and cooperation become the basis of foreign policy, with already established eco-socialist states supporting the self-determination and development of people struggling against capitalism and imperialism.

An eco-socialist society must nevertheless retain the capacity to defend itself against counter-revolution and imperialist aggression. Armed forces are therefore transformed from instruments of imperialist domination into a people’s defence force under democratic control.

Community: Decolonising society entails transforming the social relations through which capitalism reproduces individualism, alienation, and oppression. These are combated through large-scale investment in parks, libraries, theatres, leisure centres, sports facilities, community kitchens, and other shared spaces. In addition, expanding the commons enables a rediscovery of collective belonging, safety, and purpose.

Political education and accessible programmes of community healing help people confront the legacies of racism, sexism, ableism, ageism, homophobia, queerphobia, and transphobia.

III. Nature

Land: Land is the oldest enclosure. Its privatisation has driven the ecological degradation and vast wealth inequality we see today. As discussed above, the eco-socialist state enacts agrarian reform that brings land under social ownership and stewardship. Indigenous peoples regain sovereignty and control over their ancestral territories through Land Back.

Far from simply a programme of redistribution, Land Back is part of a broader transformation in humanity's relationship with nature, one that moves away from treating land as a commodity or an inexhaustible resource towards reciprocal care for the ecosystems on which we depend. Indigenous ecological knowledge and stewardship should be supported alongside collective efforts to restore degraded ecosystems, protect biodiversity, and rebuild people's material and cultural relationships with the natural world.

Hydrosphere: Oceans, lakes, rivers, and other major bodies of water must likewise be protected from the extractive development that has enriched the world’s ruling classes. Marine and aquatic ecosystems are restored. Access to water resources is managed equitably between countries and communities, as is the wealth generated from their use.

Atmosphere: Centuries of fossil-fuelled development have allowed the Global North to consume a vastly disproportionate share of the planet’s capacity to absorb greenhouse gases, driving climate change while leaving the Global South less ecological space to develop. Decolonising the atmosphere means reversing this dynamic. Global North countries must rapidly decarbonise and undertake large-scale programmes of carbon drawdown to return atmospheric CO₂ concentrations below the safe limit of 350 ppm, while providing climate finance to the Global South in recognition of their historical responsibility.

Conclusion

This is not the eco-socialist vision – merely a synthesis of ideas to spark conversation, debate, and, hopefully, political organising. Ultimately, the concrete shape of eco-socialism can only emerge through the struggles of working and oppressed people as we organise to transform the conditions of our lives, learn from the successes and failures of past and contemporary socialist projects, and develop new forms of popular power.

The journey ahead will be winding and steep. But, as the history of real-existing socialism shows us, capitalism is not eternal. The glimmers of an eco-socialist world already shine in the liberatory struggles across the globe that carry forward their legacy.