On Eco-Socialism

For a long time I didn’t have a name for what bothered me about mainstream environmentalism. Switch to renewables, change your habits, wait for the right technology. There was always this assumption that the system was basically fine and just needed better inputs. But the same question kept surfacing: why did we end up here? And the honest answer is that we got here through a specific mode of production, with specific incentives, that structurally selects against internalising the costs of harm. That isn’t a detail you can patch — it’s the mechanism itself.

Green capitalism’s fallback position is technology: carbon capture, geoengineering, some breakthrough that lets us continue as we are. I’m sceptical of this, and Buddhism has sharpened that scepticism in a way I didn’t expect. Buddhist ethics places real weight on intention — not just what you do, but what you’re reaching toward when you do it. A solar panel deployed to open a new market is not the same thing as one deployed because we owe the planet less harm. The technology is identical. The intention shapes everything downstream: who owns it, who benefits, what gets prioritised next. If the intention behind our tools is accumulation — and under capitalism, structurally, it is — then better tools don’t change much. We just cause harm more efficiently.

I want to be honest that the left doesn’t have a clean record here. Soviet industrialism wasn’t ecologically careful. Maoist development wasn’t either. Techno-productivism, growth as the measure of progress, wasn’t unique to capitalism. It was the shared assumption across most of the twentieth century left as well. That history should make us cautious. Changing who owns the factories isn’t enough if the factories are still the point.

What eco-socialism actually argues is simpler than it sometimes gets presented: common ownership is the only structural basis for making “do we need this?” a question that can be answered honestly. Under private ownership, that question loses to the incentive structure almost every time. Under common ownership, production oriented toward need rather than accumulation becomes possible. As the default, rather than a constant uphill fight. Technology developed inside that structure gets reached for differently. Because it’s useful, and because we owe each other and the planet something better than what we’re currently doing.

I hold this alongside Buddhism without feeling like they contradict each other. Both are asking: what is the intention behind this, and is it honest? What that looks like in practice stays open. I don’t think it’s meant to resolve neatly, and I’ve stopped needing it to.