Eco-Socialism
The Core Argument
Eco-socialisms, in all their variety, begin from a shared claim: that capitalism’s core logics, especially its structural dependence on accumulation, is incompatible with a finite biosphere. Where mainstream environmentalism treats climate change as a market failure to be corrected with the right price signals, eco-socialists treat it as a question of class and property. Market-based instruments such as carbon pricing, offset trading, and green consumerism are rejected as technical tweaks that leave the growth engine intact; the movement’s unifying slogan is “system change, not climate change.” However, even if eco-socialism begins with a broadly shared claim, its advocates vary in their prescriptions and commitments, with some far more reformist and others more radical.
One of the key divides in eco-socialist thinking concerns the various interpretations of socialist theory and history, and its lessons for the present. A certain school of thought, sometimes called “ecomodernist,” sees socialism and Marxism as essentially productivist, or “Promethean”— meaning that human emancipation is founded upon the mastery of nature, the scientific revolution, and technological progress. These thinkers take from Marx a concern for the relations of production and the necessity of abolishing class society, but not necessarily a concern about growth and progress per se. The aim is to grow and progress differently, but to grow and progress nonetheless. Techno-optimism is often embedded in these theories: the idea is that socialists need to be willing to solve the climate crisis “by any means necessary,” as Peter Frase wrote in the socialist magazine Jacobin. These means may take largely uncontroversial forms, like wind and solar power, but they may also veer into controversial territory, such as defenses of nuclear power, as Leigh Phillips and Matt Huber have advocated, geoengineering, as Frase argues for, plus other solutions besides.
In contrast to these Promethean eco-socialists, some thinkers explicitly oppose growth as such. “Degrowth communists” like Kohei Saito (and in a different register, the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel) argue that no feasible rate of technological change can decouple economic growth from resource use quickly enough, so the economies of Global North countries must deliberately contract. Thinkers like Saito have their own interpretations of Marx and have been essential in popularizing a theory about the “late Marx” who, in the years before his death, according to them, began to think more seriously about the limits of growth and the environmental impact of human activity. Productivist ecosocialists argue that degrowth is politically self-defeating—a program of scarcity that mimics the austerity already imposed on working people, but degrowth-minded thinkers reject this claim.
Finally, there is a related body of thought that is egalitarian and ecologically-minded, but which begins from different foundations than the eco-socialist thought described above. Here, the primary historical reference is not socialism or Marxism (or not only so), but also anarchism. It is indebted as much to figures like Peter Kropotkin as Marx and Engels. Eco-anarchists argue, like eco-socialists, that capitalism is at the root of environmental degradation and crisis, but they extend this argument further to oppose all social hierarchies as such. The more moderate wing of this tradition, indebted to the social ecology theory of Murray Bookchin, argues that along with capitalism, modern centralization and administrative forms of governing must be dismantled and replaced with decentralized, locally-oriented and self-governing communities. More radically anarchist thinkers, often called anarcho-primitivists, go further and argue that industrial society tout court must be dismantled. Beyond dismantling capitalism, industry, technology, and mass society as such are seen to be problematic and must be opposed. Anarcho-primitivists desire to return to non-hierarchical, hunter-gatherer-like forms of social organization and distribution.
Philosophical Roots
As the section above indicates, the philosophical roots of these eco-socialist tendencies go back a long way, stretching back to the socialist and anarchist traditions of the 19th century. But more recently, a series of works from the second half of the twentieth century has catalyzed eco-socialist thought.
One of these catalytic moments emerged in the 1980s via the work of political theorist James O’Connor, who founded the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism, and advanced a new theory for thinking about capitalism’s contradictions, one that rests upon the “contradiction between capitalist production relations and forces and the conditions of production,” i.e., nature broadly construed. Julien-François Gerber summarized the theory thus: “It posits, in short, that capitalism tends to destroy its own foundation via its socioecological impacts and their economic and political repercussions.”
At around the same time, the sociologist John Bellamy Foster began recovering and theorizing an until then little-known concept from Marx’s writings: the “metabolic rift.” The concept is meant to capture how capitalist industry and agriculture rupture the metabolic exchange between humanity and the rest of nature. Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology (2000) is the foundational scholarly statement of this reading.
Earlier figures were important here, too. André Gorz, who helped popularize the term “political ecology,” was an early critic of the kind of productivist socialism and Marxism that was examined in the section above. As Céline Marty says of Gorz, “His critique of both the content and the volume of capitalist production led him to the project of degrowth of social production, according to an ecological rationality that would limit it to what is sufficient: less, but better.” Gorz was critical not just of capitalist growth, but of work per se, and was especially critical of the workerist ethos he attributed to the Marxism and socialism of which his thought was initially indebted. Gorz’s 1991 Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology is a definitive statement on the themes that had driven his work in the nearly two decades before its publication.
As noted above, the libertarian eco-socialists or eco-anarchists drew on different philosophical resources, some more known and mainstream, and others more radical and unknown. One of the most interesting figures in the latter category was the late Jacques Camatte, who from the early 1970s onwards provided inspiration for anarcho-primitivists in his native France and beyond. Much of his work circulated at subterranean levels and was largely unknown in intellectual circles. Camatte argued that capitalism had come to dominate not just workers but humanity as a whole, and that production qua production was akin to the “wandering of humanity” away from its nature, as he called it in 1973. Camatte’s work was rehabilitated in the late 2000s and early 2010s by journals like Endnotes and others, and Camatte himself served as inspiration for Rachel Kushner’s critically-acclaimed 2024 novel Creation Lake.
To Know MoreBellamy Foster, John. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. Monthly Review Press (2000).
Bellamy Foster, John. The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology. Monthly Review Press (2020).
Bookchin, Murray. The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy. AK Press (2005).
Bookchin, Murray. “What is Social Ecology?” Chapter in Social Ecology and Communalism. AK Press (2007). Online version hosted on The Anarchist Library.https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-what-is-social-ecology
Camatte, Jacques. The Wandering of Humanity. Ardent Press (2017).
Frase, Peter. “By Any Means Necessary.” Jacobin. August 15, 2017.https://jacobin.com/2017/08/by-any-means-necessary/
Gerber, Julien-François. “The Second Contradiction of Capitalism.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 52, no. 5 (2025): 1071–1083.https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03066150.2025.2451285
Gorz, André. Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology. Verso (2013).
Huber, Matthew T. Climate Change as Class War. Verso (2022).
Huber, Matthew T. “The Case for Socialist Modernism.” Political Geography 87 (2021).https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629821000123
Huber, Matthew T. “The Socialist Case for Nuclear Power.” Jacobin. December 6, 2025.https://jacobin.com/2025/12/nuclear-energy-green-transition-socialism
Marty, Céline. “Reinventing Work with André Gorz.” Post-liberalism. August 13, 2025.https://post-liberalism.org/p/reinventing-work-with-andre-gorz
O’Connor, James. “Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Theoretical Introduction.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 1 (1988): 11–38.https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/10455758809358356?needAccess=true
Phillips, Leigh. “For and Against Climate Progress in the Atomic Garden.” Jacobin. August 19, 2024.https://jacobin.com/2024/08/climate-change-renewables-nuclear-energy
Saito, Kohei. Marx in the Anthropocene. Cambridge University Press (2023).
Saito, Kohei. Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto. Astra (2024).
“Time is an invention of men incapable of love.” Endnotes.https://www.endnotes.org.uk/dossiers/jacques-camatte/time-is-an-invention-of-men-incapable-of-love
Please cite this article as Ethan Sarwer and Aaron Irion, “Eco-socialism.” Vivatopia: The Lab of Political Imaginaries, September 2026.
