Defining ecosocialism

By Simon Pirani. This article is based on a talk I gave at the Ecosocialism conference in London on Saturday (2 December).

Making ecosocialism a reality is obviously a huge, many-sided collective task and here I just highlight three aspects of it. First, the ways in which the war in Gaza, that has taken up so much of all our attention in recent weeks, is relevant to it. Second, about capitalism’s impact on the environment, specifically with respect to global warming. And third some points about how we might develop ecosocialist ideas.

1. War and climate change

The connections between war and climate change are complex and go to the heart of the way the society we live in works. Thinking about these is a collective task we need to work on over time. Here are some points for discussion.

A year on, that’s still right. London demonstration, November 2022. Photo by Steve Eason

It has been suggested that a key cause of the war in Gaza is for control over fossil fuel resources. I do not agree with this: I think it’s a related, but secondary, issue. Gaza was occupied by Israel in 1967, more than 30 years before gas was discovered in the East Mediterranean. Even in 2007, when Hamas took over in Gaza and the territory was blockaded by Israel, no exploration work had been done on the major gas fields. Although one undeveloped field is in Gazan territorial waters, the larger, producing fields are in Egyptian and Israeli waters.

The war is much more about land and water, than about gas or oil. It is driven by political factors: the Israeli government’s determination to pursue ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population, and the western powers’ determination to use Israel as a strategic bulwark in the Middle East.

‘If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to act’

“An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time”, the socialist historian Howard Zinn wrote in September 2004. In an essay in The Nation, he continued:

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasise in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places – and there are so many – where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvellous victory.

Howard Zinn. Photo from Zinn Education Project

In the essay, “The Optimism of Uncertainty” (on open access), Zinn questioned the “tendency to think that “what we see in the present moment” will continue. “We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.”

He recounted the twists and turns of twentieth century history from the February revolution in Russia in 1917, the “bizarre shifts” of world war two, the “disintegration of the old Western empires” so quickly after it ended, the rapprochement between the Chinese Communist Party and imperialism, and so on. And argued:

Looking at this catalogue of huge surprises, it’s clear that the struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to it. That apparent power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervour, determination, unity, organisation, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience – whether by blacks in Alabama and South Africa, peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Vietnam, or workers and intellectuals in Poland, Hungary and the Soviet Union itself.

Howard Zinn (1922-2010) wrote the ground-breaking People’s History of the United States, that focused on the struggle of native Americans against colonisation, slaves against slavery, and workers against employers. He was active in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and protests against the Vietnam war in the 1970s, and described himself as “something of an anarchist, something of a socialist. Maybe a democratic socialist.”

Zinn wrote “The Optimism of Uncertainty” nearly two decades ago, during the barbaric counter-insurgency operation in Iraq, conducted by the US and UK forces that invaded the country in 2003. The battle for Fallujah, in which those forces levied a terrible toll on civilians, was raging.

His words seem relevant now, during the Israeli military operation in Gaza, and I have been sharing them with friends who have, like me, been shocked at the sheer brutality of the war crimes being committed daily with the full support of western governments. SP.

Wind, water, solar and socialism. Part 2: electricity networks

Electricity systems: building blocks of a socialist view. Part 2 of 2. Download both parts here as a PDF

By Simon Pirani

The first part of this article dealt with the supply of energy by renewable electricity generation or by nuclear power. This second part focuses on how electricity networks are changing.

2.1. Is it really technologically possible to base electricity networks on renewables, since they produce electricity intermittently? Could there even be advantages?

There are already big electricity networks based on renewables, and more are on their way. Denmark generates 61% of its electricity from wind and solar, and a further 23% from modern biofuel use. Three of the largest European economies – Germany, the UK and Spain – generate 41%, 40% and 35% of their electricity from wind and solar, respectively, and that share will surely keep rising. Within these countries, variable renewables’ share of electricity generation is much greater in some places: in Scotland, a nation of 5.5 million people, it averaged 60% in 2019-21 and is growing. While variable renewables only contributes 16% of the USA’s electricity, their share in the state of California (which uses more electricity than most countries) is 43%, balanced with another 24% from hydro, 10.5% from nuclear and 22.5% from gas. And then there are nations such as Norway and Paraguay, where hydro power, a non-variable renewable resource, accounts for 88% and 99.5% of electricity generation respectively.[1]

A dispatch centre in Beijing that controls most of China’s ultra-high-voltage lines and monitors renewable electricity inputs. Photo from State Grid Corp of China

The growth of renewables is forcing two big changes to electricity networks: they are becoming less centralised, and bi- or multi-directional. The networks installed in rich countries in the first half of the 20th century, and across much of the global south in the second half, were designed to carry electricity in one direction: mostly from big coal, gas and nuclear power stations, to users. Peak centralisation was in the 1970s; combined heat and power plants, and power stations using combined-cycle gas turbines (CCGT) built in the 1980s and 90s, were smaller. As for wind farms, only the largest, with 100 or more turbines, are comparable in scale to coal-fired plants. Solar power mostly operates at still smaller scales: only about half of the world’s supply is from utility-scale solar farms; the rest is from rooftop panels. In China and Europe, the leading installers in recent years, more solar is being added as rooftop panels than as solar farms.[2]

The physical decentralisation of electricity generation is accompanied by growth of centralised operational coordination. As the number and type of electricity generators increases, networks – i.e. the “grid” of transmission lines, storage facilities and the computers that regulate flows – adapt to manage their inputs. This is part of the “third industrial revolution”, analogous in some respects e.g. with changes made by a committee that uses video conferencing (geographically disparate people using centralised operational technology to work), or a newspaper (geographically disparate reporters, editors and managers who in the last century produced a physical product distributed from one physical location, and now coordinate digitally to produce multiple digital products). 

Wind, water, solar and socialism. Part 1: energy supply

Electricity systems: building blocks of a socialist view. Part 1 of 2. Download both parts here as a PDF

By Simon Pirani

Worldwide, thousands of socialists are active in movements demanding action on climate change; many more participate in co-ops and community energy projects. But our collective efforts to map the transition away from fossil fuels, and how it relates to the transition away from capitalism, have fallen short, in my view. In particular, we need some starting-points for understanding how electricity systems are changing.

In this article[1] – both this first part on energy supply, and a second part on electricity networks – I suggest what these starting-points might be. It aims at clarification, including self-clarification, and I invite responses.

I include some polemical comments on recent would-be socialist arguments, by Matt Huber and Fred Stafford, supporting nuclear power against decentralised renewables.[2]

Workers inspecting a wind farm in Inner Mongolia, China

Here are some assumptions I start with. First, in the transition away from fossil fuels, electricity’s role will expand: not only will it be used to provide heat and light, for cooking and to drive appliances and machinery, but it will have to spread in transport and industry. This expansion is to be welcomed as a method of junking fossil fuels, but unless combined with measures to curb capital’s cycles of overproduction and overconsumption – and thereby cut total throughput of energy through economies – it will fail.[3]

Second, I think renewable electricity generation is in principle better than nuclear or doubtful, borderline technologies such as hydrogen and biofuels,[4] in part because of its potential for underpinning a collectively owned and controlled energy system. However, all good (and all bad!) outcomes will most likely involve a combination of technologies; each has its pros and cons, and socially-determined potentials for good or bad uses.