Ecosocialism: connecting the crises

“We live in a time of overlapping crises and we need to connect the dots, because we don’t have time to solve each crisis sequentially. We need a movement that addresses all of them.” ~ Naomi Klein

A single mother lives in a damp flat in, say, Doncaster. She can’t afford the basic things (material conditions) that should be her right. Instead, fuel poverty forces her to choose between heating and eating, even though she has insecure, low-paid labour on a zero-hour contract at an Amazon warehouse built on what was once farmland. What’s more, her community is in a flood plain that has flooded twice in five years, and her kids have developed asthma from the black mould on the walls that is negatively impacting their education, but she can’t get her landlord to take an interest.

This is a fictional scenario, but one that reflects the lived reality of millions of people around the country. This family’s conditions aren’t down to bad luck or, worse, poor life choices, though. The above story isn’t even one of multiple separate problems. It’s of one systemic crisis with multiple faces.

But mainstream political discourse and policy, embedded in liberal capitalism, will treat her conditions as separate issues that require separate, individual solutions.

Addressing climate change adaptation is hived off to Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), which focusses on tech solutions and carbon markets. The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) is tasked with managing poverty through evermore punishing and disciplining policies that fosters feelings of guilt through discourses of individual responsibility and a focus on ‘making work pay’. The creaking NHS is charged with not just treating her asthmatic children, but also the explosion of mental health problems linked to increasing poverty and malnutrition. Housing is left almost entirely to market solutions, with help-to-buy schemes assisting those who can afford to buy property but leaving renters at the mercy of private, unregulated and sometimes unscrupulous landlords. Meanwhile, our single mother’s community flooded every few years because planning authority falls to the Housing, Communities and Local Government ministry where land use is determined by property speculation.

Poverty and mental health issues. Ill-health and poor housing. Poor housing and struggles at school. Planning and climate change. Insecure labour and poverty. While these multiple crises continue to be addressed in their silos, as separate issues instead of as several heads of one beast, even well-meaning government initiatives will struggle.

The ecosocialist analysis

An ecosocialist analysis instead connects the dots and reveals the power structures that causes, encourages or simply doesn’t care about these connected crises.

Green politics places resources at the heart of policy; water, fuel and minerals, but also resources like our labour, work and free time, public transport, access to nature, healthcare, even clean air, and asks deceptively simple questions: Who owns it? Who controls it? Who makes it a scarcity, and why? Who exploits it? Who has or is allowed access, and who is barred from it? Who benefits and who suffers when nature and community is destroyed? Who benefits from resource degradation? Who bears the costs? Who has power to decide?

Ecosocialism reveals that environmental and social problems are never just technical or scientific issues that occur in a vaccum – they’re always about power, profit, and inequality. Every crisis has winners and losers, determined by economic, ecological and political structures.

Environmental problems are always social and political problems, and often vice versa.

Why does our family above live in fuel poverty? Privatised energy companies extracting extraordinary profit, not investing in cheaper renewables and raising prices, all while the climate crisis deepens.

Why is their flat mouldy? Social housing has been starved of investment for generations, while building regulations prioritise developer profit and private landlordism remains largely unregulated.

Why does their community live in flood plain? Land use is determined by property speculation, not by ecological wisdom or by human need.

Why is the mother working on a zero-hour contract? Amazon’s model externalises all risk onto workers and governments (in the form of financial benefits to subsidise low wages), all the while extracting maximum corporate value.

Why is the warehouse itself built on farmland? Food sovereignty, the ability of a community or country to feed itself, has been sacrificed for a logistics hub serving unsustainable consumption.

And all these “whys” lead back to same answer:

Extractive capitalism.

Extractive capitalism at the expense of the individual and the community.

It’s not just the economy, stupid!

These crises are not coincidences or policy failures—they’re features of capitalism. Privatisation extracts wealth and externalises harm. Inequality is necessary to maintain low wages and discipline labour to maximise profit and shareholder value. Short-term profit is prioritised over long-term sustainability, while the GDP growth imperative drives ecological overshoot. And democracy becomes limited to protect property rights and profits.

Mainstream solutions fail because they work within the system that has created the problems in the first place. We simply can’t solve the climate without addressing inequality, we can’t end poverty without ecological limits, and we can’t achieve either without democratising the economy.

A political economy that doesn’t challenge infinite growth and private ownership of public services is insufficient to address the systemic problems we are facing.

This is why Green politics matter, to name and address the root cause of these multiple crises: extractive capitalism. Ecosocialism sees what liberalism and traditional socialism both miss:

A socialism that ignores ecological limits is a path to a different disaster that will negatively impact working class communities in far greater ways than we can imagine. A liberal environmentalism that accepts inequality will see it increase to disastrous levels.

This is why ecosocialists insist that ‘Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening.’

Ecosocialism is connecting the crises and placing people at the heart of our political economy, within the acknowledged limit of planetary boundaries.

And it is this acknowledgement that then forces us to think far more creatively about creating a comprehensive story of national renewal so that, in the coming years, we can not just survive but thrive on these green isles.