Talk:Eco-socialism

Merging Eco-socialism and Red Greens articles

Hi all,

I think the Red Greens article should be merged into this article, Eco-socialism. As far as I can see, the articles are virtually identical, except that Eco-socialism is further developed. The Eco-socialism page already redirects from and refers to Green socialism, so it is natural, in my opinion, that Red Greens should redirect here.

Eco-Socialism is essentially a better term describing the ideology that combines socialism and green politics - eco-socialists would likely call themselves Red Greens or Green Reds, so it should be merged with the ideology to be more coherent.

What do you all think? If no-one has a problem (or no-one replies), I will merge the articles after 5 days.

--Aled Dilwyn Fisher 12:54, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

I support your proposal -- so long as the merger incorporates all non-duplicated material from Red Greens, in particular the Red/Blue Greens contrast. -- Picapica 20:57, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Support, as long as blue greens are merged into eco-capitalism as well. --C mon 22:58, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Support Why wasn't that done already? MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 22:17, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

Picapica - I will make sure the Red/Blue contrast is included. C Mon, I support the merging of Blue Greens and Eco-capitalism, but I wonder if there are a few other pages that perhaps should be merged into Eco-capitalism as well, like Natural Capitalism - what do you think? --Aled Dilwyn Fisher 11:10, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

I'd discuss those changes on those talk pages. --C mon 11:50, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

Hi all - as about 5 days have passed without any objections, I will now merge the pages. Please give me more feedback on the merger I make (it's my first merger!)... Aled Dilwyn Fisher 15:22, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

I've changed it so Red Green and Red green both go to the disambiguation page and not here (in line with WP:DAB) especially as there is no meaningful distinction here. Red greens is probably still OK as the others aren't countable.

Also, I love the watermelon thing (but it is making me want to eat one now—the fruit obviously). I thought it sounded questionable but it does seem to be used on the WWW quite a bit. It's not in the OED, but I found a dictionary entry with some RL sources if someone wants to add a reference. Continuing the fruit analogy, do you call someoene who starts off as a Green but starts to become socialist too a pepper? I think I may bit a bit of a pepper. I digress.

Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley _{talk contrib} 20:52, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

Watermelon

When did people first start referring to red-greens as "watermelons"? Harvestdancer 18:38, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

I've No idea on that question, sorry. I have a related queary about the The Watermelon website refered to in the article, where it states that:

(a website in New Zealand, The Watermelon, uses the term as a compliment, stating that it is "green on the outside and liberal on the inside", using the term 'liberal' while also citing "socialist political leanings", reflecting the use of the term 'liberal' to describe the Left-wing in many English-speaking countries[7]).

The link provided in the footnotes is <http://thewatermelon.org/>, an empty site, full of advertising. The only "watermellon" site I've found is The Watermellon Blog <http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick> It's from Australia, not New Zealand, and it's tag line is "The Watermelon Blog Green on the outside, social justice inside". Which negates the commentry on "the use of the term 'liberal' to describe the Left-wing in many English-speaking countries". Maybe there was once a New Zealand based watermellon site, but it's not showing up on google now.

David Colyer (talk) 00:23, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Kovel

Huge amounts of this article refer not to eco-socialism, but just to Kovel. Where whole sections refer only to Kovel's views, these should either be supplemented/replaced by other eco-socialists, or moved to Kovel's own article. BobFromBrockley 14:51, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

Support. Most of the "Critique of other forms of green politics", "Critique of other forms of socialism", "Eco-socialist strategy", and other Sections are basically copy/paste from Joel Kovel - Wikipedia

I believe the content should be removed from the Eco-socialism article since it is already under the Joel Kovel article and it does not represent the views across the field. Pedro H.V. Santos (talk) 10:31, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

-I agree to an extent, but Kovel is the chief person who has written about Eco-socialism and is like Marx to socialism/communism, so is likely to be referenced a hell of a lot. He is the only one who has really talked about eco-socialist transition, so to remove it would take out the main author on the subject and most of the main ideas. I will try to supplement it but recommend not removing it at this stage Aled Dilwyn Fisher 15:11, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

I am not so sure. If Kovel's views diverge from other ecosocialists, then that should be discussed. As Aled points out, He and Lowy are the major figures in eocsocialism (even in the English-speaking world, citations of the two are quite similar with regard to the topic). --Duncan 13:27, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

As of October 5, 2010, there are eighteen other people besides Kovel listed in section entitled "List of Eco-socialists." Therefore, it would seem to me that the article, rather than laying out Kovel's views almost exclusively, should contain the views of a significant number of these other people. It may be that some of these do not position themselves as firmly as Kovel as "ecosocialist," but if they are listed here, the indication is that their views are, in fact, highly relevant to the discussion of ecosocialism. Discussing their views would make this an article about ecosocialism as a developing concept. As the article stands, while very informative regarding Kovel's views, it might more appropriately be entitled, "Joel Kovel's Views of Ecosocialism." —Preceding unsigned comment added by Eenwikilekter (talk • contribs) 02:25, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

Section titles

The section and subsection titles are, for the most part, much longer than they need to be, and, as a result, they make the table of contents unwieldy. How about if they are edited down to something reasonable and manageable? ---RepublicanJacobite_{The'FortyFive'} 22:09, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Help to expand Agrarian socialism article

Anyone with the time or inclination...please help to expand the article on agrarian socialism, which is related to eco-socialism but has important differences. Thanks. --172.132.78.19 (talk) 00:37, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

Influence on “existing socialist” regimes

Shouldnt the word Regimes be replaced with Governments considering Regimes is kinda used in a provocative way. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 206.116.10.54 (talk) 17:13, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Stylistic "use of" "quotes" in this article

I really like this article. However, it is fairly hard to read from a stylistic perspective in terms of the constant and needless use of "quotes" around words which themselves are not particularly "quote worthy". If the term is unique perhaps it deserves some use of italics, or if the original material is worth quoting it should be quoted in context as a block paragraph. Otherwise why not simply assume this is a broad summary of ideas and eliminate the "quotes"? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.36.210.43 (talk) 18:22, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

The use of quotes around words and phrases is often to highlight ideologically grounded phraseology - as in, there is a highly deliberate, deeper ideological context to the choice of words being used (eg, discussions on eco-socialism take place within the whole greater realm of socialism proper, which has it's own technical & ideological vocab). The more political science knowledge one has, the more this makes sense - thats the best way I can quickly explain it (the quotes add value and meaning to political scientists). Semmler (talk) 13:08, 29 May 2010 (UTC)

Overreliance on Joel Kovel´s The enemy of nature

In the sections where I added the banner on "single source" clearly we are facing strong generalizations based on a single source by one author. But not only that but in fact the entire sections named "Critique of other forms of green politics", "Critique of other forms of socialism", "Eco-socialist strategy" and "The Revolution’ and transition to eco-socialism" are based on the chapter form and almost the same titles as the Kovel book The Enemy of Nature. This is clearly a strong case of unbalance in the article and so I suggest anyone interested to check Wikipedia:Neutral point of view. As an example of the results of this I can bring out how we have a clear case of absurdity here if we adscribe to all eco-socialism the particular views of Kovel on social ecology. Social ecology is open and explicit on being a socialist current and as such saying that ecosocialism has a "critique of social ecology" is falling in absurdity due to an error of simple set and subset logic.

As I see it a lot of affirmations if not some of these sections themselves simply have to be removed or at least be reformulated in an important form.--Eduen (talk) 02:23, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

Orphaned references in Eco-socialism

I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Eco-socialism's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "naturismolibertario":

• From Henry David Thoreau: El naturismo libertario en la Península Ibérica (1890–1939) by Jose Maria Rosello
• From Anarchism: EL NATURISMO LIBERTARIO EN LA PENÍNSULA IBÉRICA (1890–1939) by Jose Maria Rosello

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT⚡ 05:28, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 12 December 2013

I think transstatal should be hyphenated or removed; it doesn't appear to be a widely recognized word, and in its non-hyphenated form it does not follow standard English conventions. Sam.hill7 (talk) 02:11, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Question: Would it be acceptable to replace "transstatal" either with "transnational" or "international" anywhere it appears? Most places in the world, state and nation are interchangeable concepts. It would be different in the United States, but that's not what is being discussed here. --ElHef (Meep?) 03:00, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

"Transstatal" is grotesque, that's for sure. Some other possibilities: inter-state, multi-state, cross-state, multinational. --Stfg (talk) 11:04, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Having pored over the dictionary, I'm going to go with transnational. For one, it appears elsewhere in the article and will synch things up nicely. It also gives a better sense of an organization being above national boundaries rather than being multiple nations (as international does). Multinational specifically means more than two countries, so I'm leaving that out. Inter-state, multi-state, and cross-state - Everything I looked up for those is referring to states in the USA, so I'm avoiding that. Changes have been made in this article and in Joel Kovel. Done. --ElHef (Meep?) 14:54, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Good call. --Stfg (talk) 14:58, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

[page needed]

[page needed] EVERYWHERE Nearly every citation is accomidated by this disclaimer. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 46.21.99.29 (talk) 21:35, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Kovel

Is this a biography regarding whoever the hell Kovel is, or an article on what eco-socialism is? Fuck him, or change the title to "Kovel's version of E-S". Paragraph 1 = What's socialism? Paragraph 2 = What's ecological politics; Paragraph 3 = What's the Venn diagram overlap between the two? Paragraph 4 = History of; Paragraph 5 = How it has evolved from then to now in its platform, and WHY it has evolved, based on further epistemological evidence gathered since the founding. 71.189.91.189 (talk) 14:22, 14 April 2015 (UTC) Since Im not a wikipedia user, as it isn't peer reviewed, here's my twitter handle to self-ident: @anonomouse1981 12015HE-04-14 T07:19 PDST Z-8

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Adding Greta Thunberg to the list.

Greta is an Eco-Militant ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAJsdgTPJpU

of worldwide fame https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02696-0

with a socialist agenda : https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/climate-strikes-un-conference-madrid-by-greta-thunberg-et-al-2019-11 "After all, the climate crisis is not just about the environment. It is a crisis of human rights, of justice, and of political will. Colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression have created and fueled it. We need to dismantle them all. "

Yet, Acroterion demande for more "sources" despite other politic personalities on the list being far less obvious in how they made it to the list. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.163.132.20 (talk) 21:35, 8 December 2019 (UTC)

You've provided your own interpretation, not explicit sources of other people with a reputation for fact-checking and reliability, who are qualified to make such judgments. Adding your own interpretation of Thunberg's words is a violation of half a dozen policies and guidelines, and is disruptive. Acroterion (talk) 21:42, 8 December 2019 (UTC)

Text block moved from sustainability

I have deleted the following text block from sustainability and am placing it here so that it (or parts of it) can be integrated into this article where it fits better. Note the text block relies entirely on just two publications: +++++++++ One school of thought, often labeled ecosocialism or ecological Marxism, asserts that the capitalist economic system is fundamentally incompatible with the ecological and social requirements of sustainability. This theory rests on the premises that:

1. Capitalism's sole economic purpose is "unlimited capital accumulation" in the hands of the capitalist class
2. The urge to accumulate (the profit motive) drives capitalists to continually reinvest and expand production, creating indefinite and unsustainable economic growth
3. "Capital tends to degrade the conditions of its own production" (the ecosystems and resources on which any economy depends)

Thus, according to this analysis:

1. Giving economic priority to the fulfillment of human needs while staying within ecological limits, as sustainable development demands, is in conflict with the structural workings of capitalism
2. A steady-state capitalist economy is impossible; further, a steady-state capitalist economy is socially undesirable due to the inevitable outcome of massive unemployment and underemployment
3. Capitalism will, unless overcome by revolution, run up against the physical limits of the biosphere and self-destruct

By this logic, market-based solutions to ecological crises (ecological economics, environmental economics, green economy) are rejected as technical tweaks that do not confront capitalism's structural failures. "Low-risk" technology/science-based solutions such as solar power, sustainable agriculture, and increases in energy efficiency are seen as necessary but insufficient. "High-risk" technological solutions such as nuclear power and climate engineering are entirely rejected. Attempts made by businesses to "greenwash" their practices are regarded as false advertising, and it is pointed out that implementation of renewable technology (such as Walmart's proposition to supply their electricity with solar power) has the effect opposite of reductions in resource consumption, viz. further economic growth. Sustainable business models and the triple bottom line are viewed as morally praiseworthy but ignorant to the tendency in capitalism for the distribution of wealth to become increasingly unequal and socially unstable/unsustainable. Ecosocialists claim that the general unwillingness of capitalists to tolerate—and capitalist governments to implement—constraints on maximum profit (such as ecotaxes or preservation and conservation measures) renders environmental reforms incapable of facilitating large-scale change: "History teaches us that although capitalism has at times responded to environmental movements ... at a certain point, at which the system's underlying accumulation drive is affected, its resistance to environmental demands stiffens." They also note that, up until the event of total ecological collapse, destruction caused by natural disasters generally causes an increase in economic growth and accumulation; thus, capitalists have no foreseeable motivation to reduce the probability of disasters (i.e. convert to sustainable/ecological production).

Ecosocialists advocate for the revolutionary succession of capitalism by ecosocialism—an egalitarian economic/political/social structure designed to harmonize human society with non-human ecology and to fulfill human needs—as the only sufficient solution to the present-day ecological crisis, and hence the only path towards sustainability. Sustainability is viewed not as a domain exclusive to scientists, environmental activists, and business leaders but as a holistic project that must involve the whole of humanity redefining its place in Nature: "What every environmentalist needs to know ... is that capitalism is not the solution but the problem, and that if humanity is going to survive this crisis, it will do so because it has exercised its capacity for human freedom, through social struggle, in order to create a whole new world—in coevolution with the planet."

• Kovel, J. (2007). The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World?. New York, NY: Zed Books Ltd. ISBN 978-1-84277-871-5.
• Magdoff, F. & Foster, J. B. (2011). What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism: A Citizen's Guide to Capitalism and the Environment. New York: Monthly Review Press. ISBN 978-1-58367-241-9.

+++++++++++

EMsmile (talk) 01:23, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

References