Ecosocialism: planned, sustainable development

On political orientation

The central message of the Yves Engler campaign for NDP leadership is that we need to start thinking outside the capitalist box if we are to make progress toward reorganizing society on a socialist basis. The NDP, from its birth in 1961, has often advocated social justice, and sometimes even talked about “socialism,” but has never seriously challenged the rights and prerogatives of the wealthy ruling elite. Yves Engler proposes to do just that.

“Building a Clean and Sustainable Canada” https://www.ndp.ca/sites/default/files/ndp-con2021-resolutions-section-02-en-v6.pdf compiles a number of resolutions on the environment from the NDP’s 2021 convention. Many of them contained good ideas—from recognizing the current global “climate emergency” to advocating “a fulsome program of investments to create jobs, reduce emissions, and make communities more liveable.” There were proposals to shift from fossil fuels to electric energy and to investment in “zero-emission vehicles” and a call for a massive expansion of public transit and “fare- free cross-country inter-city and rural public transit to connect all residents of Canada to the services, care, and communities they need.” Expanding the production of clean energy, requiring new buildings to be “net zero” carbon emitters and promoting “lower carbon food production” through “regenerative agriculture” were also advocated.

Implementing such proposals would obviously require large-scale investments to expand public infrastructure, while simultaneously moving toward shrinking or eliminating dangerous and destructive operations like the tar sands. But any serious attempt to implement such measures would be opposed by the powerful billionaires who control economic, social and political decision making. The NDP has historically pretended that it is possible to meaningfully improve the lives of ordinary workers without transgressing the “property rights” of the capitalist elite. Yves Engler is the first candidate for NDP leader who has the courage to tell the simple truth that the interests of working people are counterposed to those of the ultra-rich—it is a zero-sum game.

Yves is campaigning for the leadership of the NDP on a program that poses a radical break with the party’s history of conciliating the ultra-rich; he is advocating the nationalization of industry, transport, communications, finance and all large-scale capitalist enterprise. He knows that “Capitalism Can’t be Fixed” and that the urgent ecological and social crisis we face requires a rupture with the NDP’s reformist past.

Yves also knows that there are “tipping points,” that the Earth’s resources are finite and that economic activity needs to be managed in such as way as to support humanity without destroying the planet—some things must be scaled down or eliminated while others need to be vastly expanded. Only by transcending the logic of profit-driven capitalist accumulation will a socialist government be able to scale down or eliminate activities harmful to the ecosystem while expanding socially useful projects.

Within the left in recent years there has been considerable debate about whether the struggle against the wanton destruction of the environment should be framed as advocating “degrowth.” In recent years Monthly Review has featured a debate on this issue in which Kohei Saito, who champions “degrowth communism,” has actively participated. Saito outlined his position in this 2024 video: Kohei Saito (Tokio): Marx’s Communism in the Age of the Planetary Crisis

Saito explicitly counterposes “degrowth communism” to “eco-socialism” in one of the slides he uses in his presentation (47:26):

“Eco-socialism does not exclude the possibility of pursuing future sustainable economic growth once capitalist production is overcome.

“Degrowth communism, in contrast, maintains that growth after a certain point is not sustainable nor desirable even in socialism.

“By slowing down competition and scaling down production, it aims to fix the metabolic rift.”

Under communism, as Marx explained in a passage Saito cites from the Critique of the Gotha Program, the productive forces will be sufficiently developed to eliminate scarcity, alienated labor and social classes, and society will function according to the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” As all the great Marxists agreed, this project will only begin with the elimination of capitalist rule; it will take at least several generations before racism, male-chauvinism, homophobia, nationalism and other forms of irrationality characteristic of bourgeois society finally disappear.

Saito’s view that “degrowth communism” was a position that Karl Marx was working his way toward in his later years is controversial. While Saito denies any suggestion that “degrowth communism” will involve some sort of austerity, advocacy of a socialist future characterized by “degrowth” rather than “planned, sustainable development” is likely to create confusion. Many working-class voters who we need to win over are likely to associate “degrowth” with economic contraction and “doing without.” This sort of “degrowth” is explicitly advocated by a variety of primitivist Greens, ecofeminists and anarchists who claim that to reverse climate change humanity must shift away from modern technology and return to a supposedly more “natural” state in which people live in small, largely self-sufficient communities.

“Growth” can mean different things. Under capitalism it is measured as the quantitative expansion of the (new) value generated through the production of goods and services (commodities) for the market. Among other things, the “GDP” metric ignores all forms of wealth creation outside of commodity production. Much of what is produced for the market is toxic garbage or pure waste: e.g. junk food, marketing, products with built-in planned obsolescence, etc. In a socialist society, development will be based on the planning principle (as well as, initially at least, on market mechanisms liberated from the pursuit of private profit). In a transitional socialist economy, i.e., one not dictated by profitability, the prime consideration will be the satisfaction of social needs. Furthermore, the “scale of production,” which under capitalism is dictated by the imperative of on-going expanded reproduction (capital accumulation), would, in a post-capitalist, transitional socialist economy be determined by politically defined economic, social, demographic and ecological goals.

We live in a world in which there is a great deal of poverty and material insecurity. In 2024 an estimated 670 million people were undernourished.

https://www.statista.com/chart/15477/the-number-of-malnourished-people-worldwide/

Eradicating global poverty will require more than just redistributing existing wealth—it will be necessary to expand production to eliminate scarcity. This doesn’t have to be environmentally destructive. While China has a somewhat mixed record and is not a model socialist society, there is a lot we can learn from its dynamic economic growth in recent years. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty while the development of low-cost, low-waste, low-risk thorium nuclear energy has been pioneered along with a massive expansion of solar energy and the construction of millions of units of affordable housing.

There will need to be a lot more of this sort of development before we can ensure that every human being on the planet has a decent standard of living. Kohei Saito claims that in a global socialist system, “growth after a certain point is not sustainable or desirable.” Perhaps future generations will agree with that assessment, but are we in a position to prescribe what forms of development (whether expansion or contraction) of production, communication, transport, etc., a future communist society will embrace? The destructive activities that have produced the climate disaster must of course be eliminated, along with a lot of other wasteful or pointless economic activity characteristic of capitalism (marketing, packaging, advertising, planned obsolescence, military/police expenditures, etc.). But how can we exclude the possibility that future sustainable growth in technology and material wealth may one day permit humanity to achieve 100% recycling or the ability to access resources from other planets or other things we cannot now project.

Marx regarded the enormous acceleration of technological progress under capitalism as historically progressive. Lenin suggested that the outbreak of WWI signalled that the profit-driven mode of production had become reactionary and that establishing a global socialist economy was therefore on the immediate historical agenda.

This remains the case today—it is urgently necessary to put an end to imperialist military adventures, sinister state surveillance, poverty and ecological destruction, all generated as byproducts of the operation of the “free market.” Yves’ campaign, by focussing on the positive impact a socialist transformation would have on the lives of working people, is likely to resonate with huge numbers of voters, particularly youth. Talking about “degrowth” (even if we include qualifications about the necessity to vastly expand production of socially useful goods) will give our opponents an opening for cheap shots that could potentially confuse many people we need to win. Our core slogan on the environment should therefore be “planned, sustainable development” (or some equivalent formulation), a slogan that doesn’t commit the campaign to a particular “blueprint’ for the socialist future.

11 August 2025