THEORY
character. Contemporary green theorists now go out of their way to distin-
guish themselves from the authoritarian tradition.◗ Socialism and Marxism
Ecologism has an ambivalent relationship with socialism. Many greens
emphasise the sharp differences between the two doctrines, in particular the
socialist commitment to unconstrained economic growth, and they point to
thepoor environmental record of countries in the former Soviet bloc as evi-
dence that socialist central planning is no better for the environment than
capitalism. Indeed, Porritt ( 1984 )regards both capitalism and socialism as
formsofthe ‘super-ideology’ ofindustrialism.Conversely, socialists condemn
environmentalists for failing to recognise capitalism as the source of envi-
ronmental ills and for seeking to protect middle-class privileges such as
access to the countryside, whilst ignoring basic social issues such as poverty
(Enzensberger 1974 ). However, several theorists have sought to build links
between the opposing camps – often for reasons of practical politics – and
the manifestation of this convergence is a body of writing known asecosocial-
ism(Gorz 1980 ;Frankel 1987 ;Ryle 1988 ;Benton 1993 ;Pepper 1993 ;Hayward
1995 ; Sarkar 1999 ).
There are, of course, several distinct traditions of socialism, which can be
broadly divided into revolutionary doctrines, such as Marxism, and reformist
approaches, such as social democracy. Most versions are characterised by
two related features that seem to set socialism apart from ecologism: its
anthropocentrism and its commitment to economic expansion. First, social-
ism, like capitalism, sits firmly in the Enlightenment tradition in striving
for human mastery over nature and assuming that greater freedom will be
achieved through material accumulation. Thus Marx believed that alienated
humans could attain freedom by mastering, transforming and manipulat-
ing nature, none of which was tempered by any great concern for the non-
human world. Contemporary Marxists have condemned green ideas such
as the steady-state economy as regressive and anti-working class. Yet some
socialists point out that mastery does not have to result in environmental
destruction; it might imply a more ecologically benevolent notion of stew-
ardship (Pepper 1993 :221). Others have tried to ‘rescue’ Marxism for ecol-
ogy by, for example, reinterpreting his early writings on the dialectical the-
ory of human–nature relations (Dickens 1992 ;Benton 1993 ).^11 Nevertheless,
thesocialist tradition, including ecosocialism, bases its concern for the
environment firmly on human-centred motives, which suggests that there
is little scope for reconciling the contrasting views of human–nature
relations.
Secondly, socialism is committed to the pursuit of economic growth. Marx-
ism anticipates human emancipation occurring in a communist utopia char-
acterised by materialabundancewhere the economic pie is sufficiently large
tosatisfy everyone’s needs. By contrast, the utopian green sustainable society