A Map to Ecosocialism

Explaining the reasons for the making of his Keywords, Raymond Williams wrote that in the common language we often say that we do not understand each other because we do not speak the same language. This should not be interpreted in a literal sense, rather as a metaphor to indicate radically diverse sets of values and meanings.

I have always been struggling with the tension between the need to define and be clear about meanings and the radical openness of leaving things unsettled, somemight say confused. In academia, for instance, the obsession with defining often mirrorsa narrow gardening of disciplinary identities. In that sense, defining is more a matter of drawing borders and checking intellectual passports at the frontiers, regulating who can enter and with which credentials. This practice of defining as confining is not alien to social and political movements. There is an expression in my native tongue -- that is in Italian --, saying that especially on the left we often demand “the blood test” of our possible allies to be sure that we truly share the same visions. How can we save the need for clarity and identity without ending up in a gallery of mirrors in which we project only an infinite replication of ourselves? I am not proposing to look less ecosocialist in order to blend better with the crowd. The point is not watering down our convictions but not using them as a tight mesh filter separating us from the broader movement trying to change the world.

This experiment then does not have the ambition to establish some kind of ecosocialist canon; I do not wish to provide a toolkit for quick blood tests establishing whether one can be considered ecosocialist or not. I have envisioned this contribution as a sort of map; we invite the readers to explore it, to move between different concepts, to make connections of their own, following unexplored paths. The concepts included below should be treated as places of interest on a map. The description can entice the reader but it cannot substitute for the experience of visiting it, therefore changing it through that very experience.

Swyngedouw revisits class through the lens of the current climate crisis. De Angelis proposes his idea of commons and commoning as revolutionary practice. Barca’s forces of reproduction bring the issue of heteropatriarchy at the core of the ecosocialist project. Steinberg illuminates the power of the market in the making of capitalist ecologies. Chattopadhyay connects the capitalist commodification of nature to the colonial project of annihilation of Indigenous societies and cultures. Engel di Mauro reminds us of the need for an ecosocialist theory and understanding of the soil. Pellow tells us that capitalism cannot be understood but as racial capitalism. Armiero proposes the concept of the Wasteocene as a tool to detect the wasting relationships producing wasted people and ecosystems. Navarro Trujillo unpacks the power of interdependence as a radical theoretical and practical alternative to individualization.

Our wish is that Emancipations will continue this as a collective project, commissioning a series of maps like this one on ecosocialism. Not to be conclusive or definitive, but rather in the spirit that the work will never be done. Because we will always need to keep searching.