Socialism Socialist States And Environment

Reclaims the contentious legacy of state socialism in order to build an ecosocialist future.

Reclaims the contentious legacy of state socialism in order to build an ecosocialist future.

Presents a provocatively anthropocentric analysis of the way forward for green politics and environmental movements, exposing the deficiencies and contradictions of green approaches to post-modern politics and deep ecology.

"Our planet is gripped by twin crises of the most fundamental nature--social (mass poverty, austerity, militarism, etc) and environmental. In this document, the Democratic Socialist Party argues that they spring from the same cause--the capitalist system which places the ruthless pursuit of profit by the few before the needs of the vast majority of humanity. Environment, Capitalism and Socialism provides a comprehensive overview of the environmental crisis, the various explanations advanced for it and the responses to it. The document argues strongly for the need to build a mass popular movement to fight corporate planet wreckers and create a socialist order in which human beings will be in harmony with their environment. Included here as an appendix is editor Dick Nichols' thorough critique of so-called green taxation, often put forward as the answer to the crisis." -- Provided by publisher

This book explains how and why the state-socialist regime in Hungary used technology and propaganda to foster industrialization and the conservation of natural resources simultaneously. Further, this book explains why this process was ultimately a failure. By exploring the environmental pre-history of communist Hungary before analyzing the economic development of the Kádár regime, Pál investigates how economic and environmental policies and technology transfer were negotiated between the official communist ideology and the global economic reality of capitalist markets. Pál argues that the modernization project of the Kádár regime (1956–1990) facilitated ecological consciousness – at both an individual and societal level – which provoked great social unrest when positive environmental impact was not achieved. Today, global issues of climate change, urban pollution, resource depletion, and overpopulation transcend political systems, but economic and environmental discourses varied greatly in the twentieth century. This volume is important reading for all those interested in economic and environmental history, as well as political science.

From the Alberta tar sands and the mutilated hills of West Virginia's mining country to Australia's dying coral reefs, from the radioactive ruins of Fukushima and the seas clogged with plastic trash to the shrinking glaciers of the Andes and Himalayas, the devastation of our environment is plainly visible to all who have eyes to see. But how and why does this devastation occur? This pamphlet exposes some of the numerous links between devastation of our environment and the overwhelming drive for profit that animates the capitalist system. It brings together articles on environmental issues by members of the companion parties of the World Socialist Movement in the United States, Canada, and Britain. Following a brief introduction to the politics of the World Socialist Movement in Chapter 1, the articles that make up Chapter 2 focus on the looming peril of climate change. Other chapters discuss the emergence of new diseases, the despoliation of natural landscapes by real estate development, and the continuing massive pollution of the air, soil, and water by mining operations and the chemicals industry. Taken together, the material reveals the same forces at work throughout the world.This is the first in a new series of pamphlets planned for publication by the World Socialist Party of the United States, one of the organizations that make up the World Socialist Movement.

This volume consists of analyses by experts from both the West and the East on the up-to-date development of Eco-socialism as a red-green politics within the context of capitalist globalisation. It investigates whether and/or in what sense Eco-socialism can offer a better explanation to the causes of ecological problems than the other Green discourses - such as deep ecology and ecological modernisation theory, and thus has more contributions to make in dealing with the deteriorating ecological crisis throughout the world.