The Politics and Technology of Ecosocialism

with author Victor Wallis

Red-Green Revolution is an impassioned and informed confrontation with the planetary emergency brought about by accelerated ecological devastation in the last half-century. Victor Wallis argues that sound ecological policy requires a socialist framework, based on democratic participation and drawing on the historical lessons of earlier efforts. In the age of Trump and with a lack of sound U.S. ecological policies, Wallis’s book could not come at a better time. Red-Green Revolution confronts the emergency produced by the accelerated devastation of the last half-century. The human species is in a race against time to salvage and restore what it can of the environmental conditions that make a healthy existence possible. This task requires us to reconsider not only the type of energy that we use, but also the institutions, the technology, and the social relationships that determine what is produced, in what quantities, by what methods, and to what ends. At the heart of Wallis’s call to action is the ever-vital debate of capitalism vs. socialism and their relationships to protecting ecological order. Arguing that proper ecological policy requires a socialist framework, based on democratic participation and drawing on the historical lessons of earlier efforts, Wallis writes about how the task of establishing such a framework may evolve through the convergence of popular struggles – against all forms of oppression – as these have emerged under conditions of crisis.

Victor Wallis is a professor of Liberal Arts at the Berklee College of Music. For twenty years he was the managing editor of Socialism and Democracy and has been writing on ecological issues since the early 1990s. His writings have appeared in journals such as Monthly Review and New Political Science, and have been translated into thirteen languages.