Prospects for eco-socialism

Abstract

The analysis of the present-day crises and the development of productive forces driven mainly by the capitalist market-economy has clearly shown, the idea of socialism on the basis of a highly developed industrial society has no chance of being realised, and the traditional concept that a socialist regime's first task is to develop the productive forces and thus to increase production and labour productivity does not make sense any more. So socialists today must replace the concept of primacy of human needs and rights with the concept of primacy of environmental protection, and accept that the primary task of a new socialist regime will have to be to organise the transition to an economy based largely on renewable resources. To achieve or move towards such a type of socialism, i.e. eco-socialism, they should not focus so much on how to further prepare the material conditions for the transition as on how to create the subjective readiness of the majority of the people in the world for it. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.