Green political thoughtwould experience some degree of materialscarcity. Whereas socialists have
little problem with economic growth and wealth creationper se,greens
believe that in a finite planet unconstrained economic growth is simply
unsustainable. Socialists argue that environmental ills should be blamed
specifically on capitalism, not industrialism (and they dismiss the record of
theformer state socialist countries as irrelevant because they were never
truly socialist). It is capitalism, characterised by the dominance of the com-
petitive and dynamic market, the need to accumulate capital, the unbridled
pursuit of profit, the use of destructive technologies and the hegemony of
economic interests, which has created the contemporary ecological crisis. By
creating new goods and wants, capitalism nurtures the consumerist ethos,
whilst contributing to wider and deeper poverty, which socialists see as
theunderlying cause of environmental problems: ‘It is the accumulation of
wealth and its concentration into fewer and fewer hands which creates the
levels of poverty that shape the lives of so many people on our planet, thus
making it a major determinant of the environment which people experience’
(Weston 1986 : 5). Socialists despair that greens, with their ‘naive’ analysis
of society, miss the real target, namely the capitalist system, its institutions
and power relations.
It is on this second point that ecosocialism has started to build a bridge
between socialism and ecologism. In particular, some writers in the ecoso-
cialist tradition concede that there may be ecological limits to growth, and
that unrestrained economic expansion is unsustainable (Ryle 1988 ;Benton
1993 ;Hayward 1995 ). If the central socialist goal of changing the ownership
and control of the means of production is insufficient to prevent environ-
mental degradation, then the assumption that material accumulation is the
surest path to human emancipation is also brought into doubt. Ecosocial-
ists argue that economic growth must take account of ecological limits and
theychallenge the ‘productivity’ ethos of industrial society (Ryle 1988 ). At a
strategic level,the‘industrialism or capitalism’ debate has little immediate
significance because the global hegemony of capitalism, reinforced by the
collapse of the Soviet bloc, clearly makes it the main adversary for both
greens and socialists. Thus ecosocialism encourages greens to focus their
attention on capitalism as the root cause of ecological problems.
The emergence of ecosocialism has encouraged a process of mutual learn-
ing on other issues too. Socialism presses greens to consider how change
might be achieved when confronted by the institutions and power relations
associated with global capitalism, such as multinational corporations, inter-
national financial markets and trade liberalisation. Ecologism is rather hazy
about how the change to a sustainable society is to occur, and who will take
thelead in bringing it about. Socialists question whether the green empha-
sis on changing individual values, lifestyles and consumption patterns, com-
bined with a focus on micro-level community politics, is sufficient to over-
come the might of global capital. Conversely, socialism has endured many
setbacks since the 1980s, which combined with the decline of the industrial