Three Principles of Ecosocialist Politics
by Kai Heron
Cast your memory back to September 2019. Six million people took action globally in a week-long wave of climate protests. From Angola, to Cuba, Germany, India, Nigeria, Pakistan and even Antarctica, people walked out of school or work and took to streets and squares. I was one of them. On a clear autumnal day, our hundreds-strong contingent of workers and students marched from Manchester’s Oxford Road to join thousands more in St. Peter’s Square, the site of the Peterloo Massacre and now a sanitized city plaza. From there, we marched into the streets of Manchester’s gentrified areas of the Northern Quarter and Ancoats, once described by Engel’s as ‘hell on earth’. [1]
Our route, pre-agreed by the event’s organisers and Manchester’s police, was not meant to be a tour of Manchester’s radical past. Instead, it led us across rather than along Manchester’s major throughways and eventually into a parking lot ringfenced for private development into luxury apartments. We were marching, in other words, into a holding pen. As we drew near, plans started to form about refusing to enter the car park. Why not hold up traffic for a little longer? Why not risk arrest and make a real show of force? Others disagreed. We were making a show by marching through Manchester. More disruption would only irritate the road-using public and cause issues for the event’s organisers. Agreement was impossible. Some blocked the roads. Some walked into the parking lot to hear rousing talks from guest speakers. Many more dispersed, the energy of the moment lost, and in hindsight, never to return.
A few short months later, Covid-19 forced Britain and much of the world to go into lockdown. As politically and strategically confused as our event was, it turned out to have been a nodal point on a day that arguably marked the apex of the global climate movement. Six years later, it is clear that this kind of climate struggle — one over the climate in the abstract, one that asks the state to act on our behalf — is dead. It is equally clear that this is no bad thing. Much of the climate movement’s energy rightly swung into solidarity actions with Palestine as it suffered the full force of Zionist incursion and genocide. This struggle has radicalised generations of organisers, forcing connections to be drawn between capitalism, imperialism, racism and ecology in ways that no film, book, or lecture ever could.
Once these lessons have been learned, environmental politics in the imperial core can never be the same again. It must be bolder, more savvy about state repression, and more dialled into the lived experience of climate breakdown both at home in the imperial core and in the global peripheries. And it must be single-mindedly focused on the shared drivers of climate breakdown and the Zionist genocide: the capitalist world-system itself. Climate politics, in other words, must be ecosocialist.
The shape, form, and guiding principles of this renewed Ecosocialism are only now emerging in conversations among climate organisers, anti-capitalists and anti-imperialists. Ultimately, they will be determined in the struggles to come. Here, however, I present three that I believe are as self-evident as they are indispensable.
Ecosocialism is a Revolutionary Politics, so act as if the Revolution has Already Begun
The human and non-human world is beset by a cascading series of social, economic, and ecological crises that require urgent and radical intervention. For decades, climate scientists have been sounding the alarm about how serious things have become, to no avail. Last year, the Guardian newspaper interviewed 380 leading climate scientists and asked them how they felt about the future. [2] The Mexican scientist Ruth Cerezo-Mota answered in this way: “Sometimes it is almost impossible not to feel hopeless and broken. After all the flooding, fires, and droughts of the last three years worldwide, all related to climate change, and after the fury of Hurricane Otis in Mexico, my country, I really thought that governments were ready to listen to the science, to act in the people’s best interest.”
This is a common way of thinking among the climate science community. It is a fanciful way of thinking. The idea that governments will ‘listen to the science’ — a slogan that is incidentally used by Extinction Rebellion and that was used by the younger, more naïve Greta Thunberg — assumes that politics is conducted in the realm of ideas. It assumes that if we can just accumulate enough evidence, and if we can speak that evidence loudly enough to power, then it will act and it will act in the way that we want it to.
““With the exception of the Trump administration, the imperial core is acting on the climate crisis, and its answer is more market-based solutions and militarisation.””
The belief that world leaders will ‘listen to the science’ is fanciful, not because world leaders don’t listen but because they are listening and what they’re doing in response is not only insufficient but harmful. With the exception of the Trump administration, the imperial core is acting on the climate crisis, and its answer is more market-based solutions and militarisation. It doesn’t matter how refined our climate models become, how precisely we can predict when and where the next disaster will hit, how many people we can bring into the streets to ask nicely for swift action. No amount of granular evidence, and no amount of forceful argumentation, will make them change their course.
Cerezo-Mota also repeats another common idea: if the crisis gets bad enough, then surely the public will wake up and act. She mentions Hurricane Otis. Otis was the first hurricane to ever make landfall at intensity 5. At 1:45 am local time on the 25th of October 2023, Otis slammed into Mexico’s coastal city of Acapulco at around 165 miles an hour, ripping apart houses, tossing cars, and cutting out power and drinking water. Heavy rains caused floods and landslides that tore up the region’s coastlines, mountains, and riverbanks. Not only was Otis the most destructive hurricane in Mexico’s history, but it has increased the region’s long-term vulnerability to wildfires, floods, and landslides. But outside of the region affected, who remembers Hurricane Otis? Who hears mention of it among the world’s politicians? Or, more recently and closer to home, who hears much talk about how the heatwave that hit Europe at the end of June this year killed 2,300 people across 12 major cities?
Unfortunately, the idea that if things get bad enough, then people will act is misguided. After Covid-19, we know that even a worldwide crisis won’t necessarily make people act in ways we might like them to. COVID is an important example because it is as much a continuing global health crisis as it was an ecological crisis unleashed by capital’s drive towards urbanisation and its correlated destruction of forest habitats. Again, the mistake is to think that people aren’t acting. The uncomfortable truth is that everyone, right now, is acting just how they would act if we were in the midst of not one but several world-historical emergencies. The climate crisis, ecological collapse, genocide, and the construction of a profoundly racist proto-fascistic post-liberal order in the imperial core.
People are acting how they do — which by and large is by getting on with their normal lives — not because they don’t care. Many care deeply. So deeply, in fact, that they can’t stand to look at the images coming out of Palestine or to think too hard about the world we are passing onto future generations. The problem is that most of us, and especially working class people who must be at the forefront of a revolutionary politics, don’t have channels of action available to us that empower us to act differently. We are overburdened by work and by care commitments. Burned out and in need of a rest that never arrives because no sooner do we get on top of things than we are hit by the next personal or global crisis.
This, I would wager, includes many socialists. Socialists know that it is only through careful social and economic planning that we can heal the human and non-human worlds that have been degraded, exploited, and destroyed by capital for over 500 years. And that it is only by abandoning the idea of ‘national security’ in favour of genuine internationalism that we can act at the scale required to meet what is a planetary crisis. We also know that none of this is possible through reform. It requires a communist revolution. But who has time for that? Who has the capacity to organise more than they already do?
From an ecosocialist perspective, this is a false line of questioning. Ecosocialism is not a subjectivist politics. It does not say that the goal is to make everyone a card-carrying ecosocialist, as nice as this might be. It does not say that the revolution will take place on a specific date in the distant future. Instead, ecosocialism recognises that in some sense the revolution has already begun in the form of global working class and peasant struggles to wrest ourselves away from capital’s stranglehold on our collective reproduction, so that we can live freely and flourish together. People are fighting because they must.
This already active revolutionary force, this real movement that might abolish the present state of things, will only pick up speed and avoid defeat if those of us who are card-carrying ecosocialists can shake off the cynicism that sometimes enters our ranks, and if we can pitch our political strategies at the right level for the current conditions of struggle and levels of class consciousness.
This is important because for the revolution to succeed, it must be a popular revolution, which means that it must appeal to and empower the vast majority. The masses must be able to look at images of the latest hurricane making landfall thousands of miles away or the latest Palestinian body smeared across the rubble of their family home by a GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb and know that there is something they can do about it. And, crucially, it must draw in those segments of the working class tempted by the false reactionary solutions to the world’s problems spouted by the far far-right. Which brings us to the second principle of ecosocialism.
2. Never Separate Environmentalism from Social Issues
What do you think of when you hear the word ‘environment’? Perhaps a green landscape filled with trees, fields, and wildlife. Perhaps an ocean. Most people don’t think of city centres, suburbs, housing estates, sewers, airports, and shipyards.
In the 1970s, the Black Radical Nathan Hare penned a brief essay called ‘Black Ecology’. [3] In it, he made a distinction between what he called white ecology and black ecology. White ecology meant idyllic vistas of trees, fields, and frolicking wildlife. A landscape strangely devoid of people. Black ecology meant the urban ghetto. A geography choked with people forced into inhospitable conditions by profiteering landlords, formal and informal racial segregation, and gentrification. Black ecology is the house infested withants. It’s the mould colonising people’s lungs, choking them of air because of damp issues landlords refuse to treat. It’s the child born with learning difficulties because of high atmospheric levels of nitrogen oxide in dense urban environments.
““We must recognise that ecological questions are already a part of every single struggle.” ”
Hare’s point was that the ‘environmental movement’ that had blossomed after the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 had made the mistake of separating environmentalism from where people live, work, and die. It had cleaved environmental issues away from power, race, gender, and class.
Hare’s criticisms are worth repeating because parts of the environmental movement, and indeed some ecosocialists, have still not learned the lessons he hoped to teach. Environmentalism isn’t a discrete ‘issue’ to be added to a long list of discrete ‘issues’ we fight for. Justice is not mathematics. We don’t reach it by adding climate justice to anti-racist justice, to feminist justice, to disability justice, and so on. Instead, we must recognise that ecological questions are already a part of every single struggle.
Sometimes this is obvious. Fighting to retrofit old housing stock, for example, is good for the environment because it reduces the amount of energy we need to heat our homes, and it’s good for workers because using less energy means bills are cheaper. But the connections aren’t always so clear. Ecosocialism is a politics that is adept not only at saying that every class struggle is an ecological struggle, and every anti-racist struggle an ecological struggle. It is a politics highly skilled in integrating these elements into one struggle in a compelling and popular fashion.
Today this skill is more important to develop than ever. The right has unfortunately constructed an extremely dangerous form of fossil fuel populism based on the idea that environmental issues are too expensive. The imperial core’s workers, they argue, are being asked to foot the bill for an energy transition that they can’t possibly afford, and all because of sensationalism around how severe the climate crisis is. This story has been so successful that large parts of the public in Europe have fully absorbed it. A recent study, for example, found that the British public overestimate the cost of Net Zero by a shocking 14,000%. [4]
An ecosocialist politics doesn’t try to educate the public about the true costs of net zero. In part because netzero exists to permit further fossil fuel combustion and not to decarbonise the global economy, but mainly because an ecosocialist politics knows that you don’t move people with arguments, you move them by proving in practice that an ecosocialist present and future means a better quality of life for them and their loved ones.
As Amilcar Cabral says, ‘always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children’. [5]
3. Anti-Imperialism is Not an Optional Extra
It wasn’t that long ago that talk of imperialism among the West’s left was the narrow pursuit of traditional Marxist groups influenced by Lenin. Today, in the wake of Israel and its US and European ally’s ongoing genocide in Palestine, the word imperialism is on everyone’s lips. And yet it’s fair to say that there isn’t strong agreement about what imperialism is. Is it the foreign policy of the US, its allies, and regional proxies? Is it when extra-economic violence is used against a people? Is it evidenced by value drains from the periphery of the world-system to the core? Is Russia imperialist? Is China?
From these disagreements it follows that there is disagreement about what it means to fight against imperialism. The fight to end the genocide in Gaza is obvious, but it is also obvious that this won’t end imperialism. If our anti-imperialism is to mean something more than solidarity with Palestine — and it must — then an ecosocialist politics today must become much clearer on what an anti-imperialist politics involves and what it asks of us as individuals and collectives based in the imperial core.
In Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism Lenin warned that many Marxists were ‘internationalist in words, and social chauvinist in deed’. [6] He was referring to the decision among European communist parties to support war credits for their bourgeoise governments. Today, ecosocialism must grasp that many are still internationalist and anti-imperialist in words and social chauvinist in deed, but in more subtle ways.
Building trade unions in the core to manufacture green products that will be sold to the global south for a profit, or which they can only access through the purchase of loans granted by Western banks and international organizations, is imperialist. Rewilding parts of our landscapes to meet carbon targets, which studies show offset ecological destruction and emissions to the Global South, is imperialist. [7] Suggesting that we don’t need to reduce our overall energy and material consumption in the imperial core as part of a transition towards an ecosocialist future is imperialist. Critiquing the so-called ‘extractivist’ project of development in states like Venezuela, or questioning the democratic credentials of sanctioned countries like Cuba, is imperialist. These things are imperialist because they are social chauvinist. Unfortunately, social chauvinism is all too common among some so-called socialists and among environmentalists in the imperial core.
““Today, ecosocialism must grasp that many are still internationalist and anti-imperialist in words and social chauvinist in deed, but in more subtle ways.” ”
All of this stands as confirmation of what Lenin said internationalism must mean for those in the imperial core:
“internationalism on the part of oppressors or ‘great’ nations, as they are called (though they are great only in their violence, only great as bullies), must consist not only in the observance of the formal equality of nations but even in an inequality of the oppressor nation, the great nation, that must make up for the inequality which obtains in actual practice.” [8]
What does this mean today? To make up for the inequality that exists in practice means to dismantle the apparatus of imperialism at home, which is an apparatus that differentially exploits both us and those in the periphery. Imperialism is the form that global capitalism takes today, and capitalism is an impediment to our collective flourishing. It is what stops us having more free time, better working conditions, more biodiverse landscapes, good quality nutrient dense food, and so much else besides.
‘The main enemy’, as Karl Liebknecht said, ‘is at home.’ [9] Ecosocialism must grasp this intuitively and act on it, resisting imperialist foreign policy, disrupting weapons manufacturing, breaking apart chauvinistic trade unions, materially assisting anti-imperialist forces internationally, and materially supporting movements for popular development in the Global South, because our lives, and the lives of workers everywhere, depend on it.
This essay is a lightly edited version of a talk Kai Heron gave at the RISE Summer Camp in August 2025.
Kai Heron is a Lecturer in Political Ecology at Lancaster University. He is the co-author with Keir Milburn and Bertie Russell of Radical Abundance: How to Win a Green Democratic Future (Pluto Press, 2025)
Notes
[1] Engels, Friedrich, and Tristram Hunt. 2009. The Condition of the Working Class in England. Edited by Victor Kiernan. Penguin Classics.
[2] Carrington, Damian, Damian Carrington Environment editor, Alessia Amitrano, et al. 2024. ‘“Hopeless and Broken”: Why the World’s Top Climate Scientists Are in Despair’. Environment. The Guardian, May 8. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2024/may/08/hopeless-and-broken-why-the-worlds-top-climate-scientists-are-in-despair
[3] Hare, Nathan. 1970. ‘Black Ecology’. The Black Scholar 1 (6): 2–8.
[4] Oliver, Craig. 2025. ‘The Public Don’t Understand Net Zero - It’s Time for New Arguments’. City AM, June 16. https://www.cityam.com/the-public-dont-understand-net-zero-its-time-for-new-arguments/
[5] Cabral, Amilcar. 1965. ‘Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories...’ Marxists.Org. https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1965/tnlcnev.htm.
[6] Lenin, Vladimir. 2010. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Penguin Classics.
[7] Balmford, Andrew, Thomas S. Ball, Ben Balmford, et al. 2025. ‘Time to Fix the Biodiversity Leak’. Science 387 (6735): 720–22. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adv8264.
[8] Lenin, Vladimir. 1922. ‘The Question of Nationalities or “Autonomisation”’. Marxists.Org. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/autonomy.htm.
[9] Liebknecht:, Karl. 1915. ‘The Main Enemy Is At Home!’ Marxists.Org. https://www.marxists.org/archive/liebknecht-k/works/1915/05/main-enemy-home.htm.