Flyer for Ecosocialism 2026. Held at Albion Peace Centre, Magan-djin/Brisbane, Australia.
John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Oregon. He is the author, most recently, of Breaking the Bonds of Fate: Epicurus and Marx (Monthly Review Press, 2025). Álvaro de Regil Castilla is executive director of the Jus Semper Global Alliance and a researcher and writer proposing a transition to Geocratia, the ecosocialist paradigm in pursuit of the well-being of people and the planet and not the market.
This interview was originally published by the Jus Semper Global Alliance in August 2025.
Álvaro J. de Regil Castilla: Thank you for taking the time to do this interview. In my work on social justice, for many years I was primarily concerned with understanding and exposing the global exploitation of workers in the Global South through unequal exchange perpetrated by corporations through labor arbitrage. However, after reading much of what you have written this century, I have concluded that the planetary crisis we are experiencing as a result of dominant monopoly capital poses an imminent existential risk to humans and nonhumans unless we urgently organize ourselves to force a radical paradigmatic shift. This new paradigm would replace capitalism with new ecosocialist communities whose only purpose is the pursuit of the well-being of people and the planet through a revolutionary movement. With this vision in mind, I would like to focus on how you envision moving from theory to the actual materialization of a revolutionary movement that successfully transitions to the ecosocialist paradigm.
If we were to envision a genuinely democratic ethos advanced by the ecosocialist revolutionary movement, what would be the central tenets that the ecosocialist communities must develop and practice?
John Bellamy Foster: The democratic ethos advanced by a revolutionary ecosocialist movement would have as its final aim a society operating under the communal principle of from each according to one’s ability, to each according to one’s need, so as to promote sustainable human development. The relevant community here would have to be extended to external nature, particularly where questions of natural reproduction arise, as envisioned in Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic.” “The justice of nature,” Epicurus wrote in antiquity, “is a pledge of reciprocal usefulness, that is, neither harm one another nor be harmed”; or as Karl Marx put it, in relation to Epicurus, “the world is our friend.”
ÁDRC: In Capitalism in the Anthropocene (Monthly Review Press, 2022), you wrote that a revolutionary ecological struggle would need to occur in two phases: (1) an “ecodemocratic phase” emerging within the capitalist system, involving the formation of a broad, working-class based ecosocialist alliance capable of going against the logic of capitalism; and (2) an “ecosocialist phase,” where the impetus provided by the previous phase would create the conditions for superseding capitalism altogether and the creation of a society aimed at “substantive equality, ecological sustainability, and collective democracy,” actualizing socialism. Such an ecorevolutionary process would reconstitute social metabolic reproduction, making it sustainable for future generations and the Earth System. You explain that revolutionary ecological struggle could conceivably start at the local level in the interstices of the system and then extend to large political-economic entities.
Do you think that the radical shift toward ecosocialism can be successfully carried out within today’s nation-states, or would these states constitute barriers that would need to be dismembered, with communities creating their own sovereign entities? Is there another way?
JBF: In writing about the phases of the revolutionary ecological struggle, I was attempting to deal with the acceleration of the global environmental crisis and the fact that, when considering tipping points in relation to climate change and other related environmental threats of hardly less severity, a common argument, even in radical circles, is that if capitalism cannot solve the problem and socialism is not in reach within the relevant time span, then there is nothing we can do and we have to accept that we have already lost. Such a defeatist view, however, is the wrong way to think strategically about the transformations needed, since revolutionary movements necessarily begin within a given class society. Socialism/ecosocialism does not burst out all at once like Athena from the head of Zeus. It is part of a long process in which some gains/footholds are made along the way. Radical or revolutionary reforms, as we sometimes call them, are the product of objectively anticapitalist movements, even if the struggle is not able yet to transform the entire society. Given that human survival, in the sense of the threatened lives and livelihoods of billions of people and preservation of human civilization, is in question today, what I termed a broad “ecodemocratic movement” spearheaded by ecorevolutionary forces is the only answer.
William Morris in nineteenth-century England was the first to refer to a movement toward socialism, recognizing that a genuine revolutionary movement emerged within the larger antagonistic society, and sought to break with it both in part and whole, necessarily moving forward in stages, but at no point ceasing to be revolutionary in its aims. The discussion of what I referred to as the “ecodemocratic phase” of the struggle was followed by a list of concrete actions, some large and some small, that the ecorevolutionary movement could advance, directed at the staving off of climate disaster. Such measures could be seen as belonging to the realm of objective necessity, while going against the accumulative logic of capital. (This argument was developed earlier in a book that Fred Magdoff and I wrote called What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism [Monthly Review Press, 2011]). Obviously, in terms of the contradictions of capitalism, and today’s exterminist tendencies, no halfway house is possible, and the ecosocialist movement has to struggle incessantly for a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large. But where issues like climate change arise, limited—and sometimes stop-gap—measures that allow us to avoid tipping points leading to global disaster have to be fought for within the present system, even as we strive to transcend it.
In terms of revolution starting at the local level, in the interstices of the system, I think this is part of a general logic. Marx talked in Capital about how “trading nations, properly so-called, exist only in the interstices of the ancient world, like the gods of Epicurus, in the intermundia [between the worlds].” The same could be said in a way for the bourgeoisie in the urban centers of the medieval world, a world which was centered on the feudal manor. The implication is that the basis of revolutionary change is often formed within the interstices of society in local communities and on the periphery.
It is important to emphasize too, that while there is a common enemy in capitalism, conditions vary among countries and localities, and there is no single path to ecosocialism/ecocommunism. We have to recognize the diversity of revolutionary vernacular traditions.
ÁDRC: Do you think that to materialize the ecosocialist paradigm, we would need to force a new social contract in each society designed to produce a structural change to replace capitalism?
JBF: The concept of the social contract, or a mutual compact between people, originated, as Marx explained, with Epicurus in antiquity. According to Epicurus and his later Roman follower, Lucretius, human beings originally—that is, before recorded history (a period known as vita prior)—adopted a social contract not to harm each other or to allow themselves to be harmed, evoking the principle of reciprocity as the basis of all justice, rooted in a society of friends. However, with the growth of population and technology, the discovery of gold, and the building of walled fortresses, as Lucretius explained in De rerum natura, there arose the age of kings, and, eventually, social revolt and “the death of kings,” leading to the city-state and a society of laws. This constituted a new, more contradictory form of social contract, which embraced class relations, state religion, etc. Civil strife and wars did not cease and society was torn with conflict, leading to the death of tens of thousands in a single day, making a mockery of the new society of laws and requiring a resurrection of the society of friends rooted in reciprocity.
For Marx, who was strongly influenced by Epicurus, communism was the re-creation of the original social contract of communal society on a higher basis. If the bourgeois revolution in the works of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau had argued for a social contract, it was always in a form that defended what Marx called the “duality” of civil society and state of the bourgeoisie. For Marx, in contrast, a new revolutionary social compact, rooted in the associated producers, would be aimed at a communal, egalitarian order, requiring the withering away of the state/civil society duality. The free development of each would be the basis of the free development of all. Moreover, he insisted that this demanded a sustainable human-nature metabolism.
In terms of your comment on the need of forcing a new social contract on the existing order, in the formation of an ecosocialist society, the best example that we have of this is the Bolivarian Constitution in Venezuela drafted by the Constitutional Assembly with ratification by the people. This resulted in the creation of a new, protagonistic democracy, pointing toward a communal state, constituting the basis on which the Law of the Communes was later enacted. Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution was not initially ecological, having inherited an earlier petrostate, and came under imperialist pressures from outside. However, its grassroots base has allowed not only the spread of communal production and ecological principles but dramatic gains in food sovereignty.
ÁDRC: Would the approach to force change be a movement of peaceful resistance anchored in no participation/no cooperation with the prevailing system?
JBF: This is difficult to answer. Obviously, peaceful resistance anchored in non-participation/non-cooperation with the prevailing system should be pursued. All popular revolts and revolutionary movements in history have started out this way. General strikes, together with every form of democratic struggle and mass organization should be utilized, along with the Gramscian war of position within civil society. But we know from centuries of history that every attempt at mass, democratic, peaceful revolt, insofar as it is effective and threatens capital accumulation or to upend the existing class order, is sooner or later responded to with state violence and repression. The case of Salvador Allende’s democratically elected socialist government in Chile is a case in point, which was brought down by a bloody military coup instigated by the United States. A similar coup attempt in Venezuela against Hugo Chávez was cut short only by the fact that the main part of the military, together with the population, supported the revolutionary Bolivarian Constitution.
ÁDRC: Let’s talk about degrowth. There is an enormous global inequity in responsibility between well-off people and the dispossessed for the ecological rift of ecosystems and the Earth Systems as a whole. How do you foresee your planned degrowth being implemented and evolving in the metropolis and the system’s periphery to achieve communities of substantive equality and ecological sustainability? Would the core engage in “degrowth” while the periphery grows until all its real necessities are fulfilled? Or should degrowth occur based on the ecological footprint of different echelons of society until all its real necessities are fulfilled? Or should degrowth occur based on the ecological footprint of the different echelons in society in both the center and the periphery? In other words, do both middle and upper classes, North and South, with unsustainable footprints, need to drastically reduce their consumption habits while consumption grows among the dispossessed to meet their real needs?
JBF: I think it is important to understand that degrowth is not a principle of socialism. Rather, the governing principle of socialism in Marx’s vision was sustainable human development. (See Paul Burkett, “Marx’s Vision of Sustainable Human Development,” Monthly Review, October 2005.) Sustainable human development requires both substantive equality and ecological sustainability, neither of which can develop fully without the other, and which together constitute the meaning of socialism in our time. A society of sustainable human development in this sense requires democratic socialist planning. In terms of present-day capitalist society, it would require superseding capitalist class relations. Obviously, this is a revolutionary project, but it is one in which the struggles in relation to freedom and necessity uniquely overlap in our time.
Degrowth means that the waste-ridden, overaccumulating, class-polarized (and racist and misogynist) societies of the imperial core, with per capita ecological/energy footprints far beyond what the world as a whole can sustain, must decelerate and deaccumulate, reducing their wasteful class and corporate-based expenditures and their extractivism— if humanity as a whole is to survive and if a new relation to the earth of sustainable human development under socialism is to arise. This can be accomplished while enormously improving the conditions of most of the population. Degrowth is an ecological necessity in the core imperial nations of the Global North. The best way of understanding this is in terms of per capita energy consumption. The United States uses almost three times as much energy per capita as Italy, while Italy at present represents the level of per capita energy consumption that is sustainable at the global level, according to Erald Kolasi in his marvelous book, The Physics of Capitalism (Monthly Review Press, 2025). The sixty or so countries that use more energy per capita than Italy need to reduce their per capita energy consumption to that level, in what is sometimes called a process of contraction and convergence. To be sure, it is not quite as simple as that, since embodied energy transfers within the imperial system, arising from the fact that most of the labor in production is now in the Global South while consumption takes place disproportionately in the Global North, in a process of unequal ecological exchange, needs to be taken into consideration as well. But the reality is that the majority of the countries in the world have per capita energy consumption below the sustainable level and the only stable ecological solution is to move towards contraction and convergence aimed at all countries conforming to the globally sustainable level of per capita energy use.
If we look at degrowth in this way, as applying mainly to those countries that are utilizing the disproportionate and unsustainable levels of energy, then the underlying necessity, if the world as a whole is to get on a path of sustainable human development, stands out. It also makes it clear that the planetary ecological crisis is a crisis of imperialism, in that those countries that have the highest per capita energy use are either the imperialist countries or the key extractivist nations that are largely within the imperialist orbit. In all this, the key ecological and socialist principle remains sustainable human development.
Yet, capitalism is a class society, not just an imperialist one. The broader principle of sustainable human development, which is really the principle of socialism itself, demands a society of substantive equality. In both the Global North and the Global South, the drive to substantive equality, that is the end of class hierarchies, is necessary if ecological sustainability and substantive human development are to be achieved. Indeed, in all capitalist countries, it is the wealthy, both directly in their individual consumption and in their ownership of corporations, who mainly account for the structure of extreme energy use. Rational planning for sustainable human development therefore requires redistribution of wealth, and, more importantly, control of production by the associated producers. The top 1 percent of households in the United States is estimated to have carbon emissions that are fifty-seven times that of the bottom decile in the country, and 597 percent times the average per capita emissions in low-income countries (Jared Starr et al., “Assessing U.S. Consumers’ Carbon Footprints Revealed Outsized Impact of the Top 1%,” Ecological Economics 205 [March 2023]). The problem of the ecological rift affecting the planet today is thus largely one of the class and imperial relations of capitalism. Only a society of associated producers rooted in communities of equitable social metabolic reproduction, and relying principally on planning rather than the market, can overcome this.
ÁDRC: Lastly, do you think that we still have time to organize to force the radical change necessary to avoid the transgression of planetary boundaries, or at least mitigate meaningfully the metabolic rift in the Earth System, given the speed with which “The Revenge of Nature,” to quote Frederick Engels, is occurring?
JBF: Seven of the nine planetary boundaries have already been crossed, signaling that we have already left the planet as a safe place for humanity. Global warming is accelerating, as are extreme weather effects. Sea level rise will continue now for centuries whatever actions we take, though our actions can still affect the speed with which it rises. The problem with climate change and other ecological rifts such as loss of biological diversity is that they do not occur in a linear fashion, but what we see instead are tipping points and ecological system crashes as we pass critical thresholds. James Hansen, in many ways still the leading U.S. climatologist, says that it is no longer possible (certainly within current social parameters) to prevent a 2°C degree increase in global average temperature. But at that point things become increasingly iffy, as once certain tipping points are crossed, such as the melting of Arctic ice, the release of methane due to the thawing of the tundra, die downs in the Amazon, etc., we could reach a situation of uncontrollable rises in average global temperature of 4°C or more, which contemporary science suggests would result in the downfall of industrial civilization as we know it. Global warming in a sense feeds on itself since the destruction of the Amazon rainforest through climate change could lead to still higher global average temperatures. If this were not enough, given that multiple nations are armed with nuclear weapons, an undermining of the material (ecological and economic) foundations on which capitalist production is based could destabilize states, increasing conflict and accelerating the chances of a global thermonuclear exchange and nuclear winter. This points to a general crisis of exterminism.
There is no doubt that humanity is facing an existential crisis. The lives and livelihoods of billions of people are threatened this century. I think it is important to recognize that this raises the question of survival on the largest scale. The level of catastrophe that we are pointed to in this century and the next is so great as to be nearly impossible to gauge. Moreover, it will affect untold numbers of species besides our own. What we do now or in the near future will make all the difference. I am convinced that, faced with the destabilization of the planet as a safe place for humanity and the deterioration of material conditions—both ecological and economic—due to the capitalist world system, humanity will fight as never before. Already we can see this in the hundreds of millions of people around the world who are resisting these developments in various ways. The qualitative nature of these movements, as well as their quantitative numbers, are bound to increase. Once it is generally understood that the only way out of the Earth System crisis is a change in our social relations, that technology by itself cannot do the job, certainly not under the present system, the result will be revolutionary. Then we will see a common struggle. Will there be time? I do not know. These things cannot be measured. The only certainty is the urgency of the struggle, and the inevitable emergence of a worldwide environmental proletariat as an active force for change.
Read the original at Monthly Review.
