This paper contributes to Contradictions’ “Conceptual Dictionary” by exploring the history, theory, and practical implications of the notion of “ecosocialism”. The first part of the text follows the historical and ideological development of ecosocialism and examines its broad and diverse anarchist, feminist, and Marxist roots. This part of the text also introduces key authors of ecosocialism and their work. The subsequent part identifies critical ideas and offers a theoretical overview of scholarly and political debates about the relationship between ecosocialism and other environmental and socio-critical approaches. Finally, the text further explores the practical and political vision of the concept and reflects on the future of ecosocialist strategy.
The article is devoted to the discussions concerning economic growth and the environmental crisis that took place in Poland in the 1970s. The author focuses on two scientific conferences and the publications that accompanied them in order to analyse the questions of economic growth, science, technology, and consumption with regard to raising awareness of the ecological crisis. The reception of the Polish translation of The Limits to Growth is one of the questions discussed more specifically in the article. The main purpose of the article is to amend the ecological dimension of socialist thought and to reconstruct the main tensions and contradictions between the ecological and productivist tendencies within socialist ideology. The author analyses these questions in the context of degrowth theory and with regard to the current climate and ecological crisis.
This interdisciplinary study presents a philosophical-critical reflection on the concepts of the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene from the perspective of the humanities and social sciences. In the study, I will argue from a post-Marxist perspective that the Anthropocene is a reductionist concept, because it does not reflect capitalist processes (industrialization, commercialization, commodification, etc.) or systemic imperatives (growth, competitiveness, flexibility, and profit maximization – all elevated to axiomatic bases of economic and social policy) or patriarchy, colonialism, and racial formations. The aim of the study is to outline the parameters of a post-Marxist critical reinterpretation of the concept of the Anthropocene in relation to the concept of the Capitalocene, taking into account the functioning of global (late) capitalism, with its basic systemic imperatives that produce structural social and environmental “defects”, “excesses”, and various „injustices“; also accounting for gender and race, gender roles, post-colonial and (post-)feminist studies; and considering, finally, the need to create a normative-ontological framework for global environmental and social justice.
By the time liberals triumphantly proclaimed the end of history, some environmentalists had already begun to mobilize the public against Western modernity by proclaiming the end of nature. For many people, the environmentalist agenda meant a new ideology that could replace classical ideologies; many, on the other hand, understood environmentalism as radically anti-ideological. In this text, I will focus on the relationship between nature and society that lies in the core of both environmental thought and modern emancipatory projects. I will try to expose the inherent contradictions that environmental discourse inherited from liberalism and Marxism.