Reflections on the Founding of the First Ecosocialist International
September 5, 2018
by Quincy Saul
(A shorter version of this essay first appeared on Radical Ecological Democracy, edited by Pallav Das)
In times of global nightmares, there is good news! Through the gauntlet of world war and mass extinction, the message arrives: in a maroon municipality in the mountains of the Venezuelan northwest, one hundred delegates from five continents came to consensus and made a covenant with Mother Earth, registered in a combined strategy and a 500 year plan of planetary action. The First Ecosocialist International has been founded! It may take years for the full implications to be grasped, but already its initiation can be recognized and recorded.
It has been six months since this news was broadcast to the world. In that time I have participated in events and encounters throughout the United States – New York City, Los Angeles California, New Orleans Louisiana, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, and Jackson Mississippi – in which this good news has been shared and discussed. Informed by this tour, and by participation in preparatory meetings in 2015 and 2016, what follows are reflections on the ‘frequently asked questions’ – the who, what, when, where, why and how – of the First Ecosocialist International.
Any event on the stage of world history tests its would-be participants and historians, and this author’s best efforts are likely to fall short of their calling. As one delegate has written, “I believe that I have not processed and cannot fully express all the lessons from this experience, and that in fact the foundation of the First Ecosocialist International is a threshold event to something even more profound.”(1) This essay is a modest attempt to begin articulating something audacious. Hopefully it may serve as an invitation and/or provocation to others, to add their voices and visions to the urgent conversation.
WHO? Maroons.
The Ecosocialist International is not the invention or possession of any single person or party. It is the fateful convergence and culmination of a global ecosocialist movement, which is in turn the irrevocable consequence of a capitalist world system which threatens humanity and nature with extinction. Like the First International of the nineteenth century, it “deals in principles and not in personalities.” Nonetheless, the characters and characteristics of the group to whom this world-historic responsibility devolved are not accidents.
First of all, they were maroons. The hosting communities – the towns of Agua Negra, Palmarejo and Taria, in the municipality of Veroes and the state of Yaracuy – are the direct descendants of the rebels of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, who escaped from slavery and colonialism and built maroon communities whose legacies of liberation are lived to this day. These maroon communities have always been internationalist; comprising Africans of many linguistic/ethnic groups; indigenous peoples of the region who were also resisting conquest, and even a few maroon Europeans from the underclasses of colonial society, who sought a different model of civilization outside the plantation economy.
The capacity of the communities of Veroes to logistically host and politically inspire international delegates from five continents – in the midst of a national economic crisis no less – was a natural fulfillment of this maroon legacy, which for centuries has advanced a vision of revolutionary internationalism and guarded the seeds of its mode of production. When on the evening of November 2nd in the town of Taria, an indigenous cacique danced with an afro-venezuelan cimarrona, this legacy was convoked and consummated in an assembly of 21st century maroons from five continents who were warmed and guided by the same fire as their predecessors.
And who were these delegates? There was not an open invitation to Veroes; a limited number of participants were invited based on criteria established a year before in a preparatory international gathering. Unlike other international formations, past and present, the delegates were selected not based on their political line but on their political practice. They came to build unity where it exists (in practice) and not where it doesn’t exist (in theory).
There were a few famous personalities present. Hugo Blanco and the son of Sabino Romero, Wahu Kaara and Julio Escalona. Charlotte O’Neal and Dhoruba Bin Wahad. And there were a few charismatic movements represented: the Mesopotamian Ecology Movement from Kurdistan. The Water Defenders’ School from Standing Rock. The Sarvodaya Shramadana movement from Sri Lanka. But for the most part these were younger and lesser known personalities; not the big wigs from the conference circuit or the famous authors, but representatives of the next generation of revolutionary internationalism.
This was not a conference. As it says in the preamble to the Plan of Action, “The First Ecosocialist International is not just another meeting, nor another conference of intellectuals to define ecosocialism. We believe that ecosocialism will define itself to the extent that it is reflected and conceptualized in praxis; based on what we do and what we are.” And so the question of who is the question of what: ontology before epistemology! And so the Ecosocialist International is not an external but an internal force; it doesn’t dictate from above, but emerges and is determined from within. Ecosocialism is the struggle of the children of Mother Earth on every continent, joined together against patriarchy and capital, racism and war, against class power as organized by transnational corporations and nation-states.
And if it starts small, or if it seems powerless now, that is no reason to be discouraged. As the Internationale has been sung for generations, “we have been naught, we shall be all.” The preamble continues: “We recognize that we are only a small part of a spiral of spirals, which has the profound intention to expand and include others until all of us are rewoven with Mother Earth; to restore harmony within us, between us, and among all the other sister beings of nature.”
HOW? Combined Strategy and Plan of Action
Pause and reflect on the political gravity of this accord: a global agreement of action, for the short, medium and long term, agreed to in assembly by maroons and indigenous nations, Marxists and ecologists, anti-capitalists and anti-colonialists… a convergence of revolutionary currents in history into a Maroon International… There is no historical precedent I know of for this formation; even as it pays homage to the previous Internationals, it promises in form and content to surpass them. How was this accomplished, and how will it be carried forward?
The breakthrough of who (those with practice) was accompanied by a breakthrough of how. Our goal was not a definition of ecosocialism, but a program of ecosocialist action. This program would be based on the sentiment expressed in the popular slogan “only the people can save the people” – on the principle that we should not beg or bargain with our enemies over the fate of humanity and nature, but take responsibility for our collective destiny. Thus we would avoid as much as possible the ritual of demands and denunciations, with which so many conferences and convergences are occupied.
Another crucial answer to the question of how, has been the commitment to prefiguration. Rejecting the predominant schizophrenia which separates means from ends, the convocation and founding of an Ecosocialist International had to strive to be an embodiment of the return to Mother Earth. And so it was born, not in an incubator of styrofoam and fluorescent lights, but under trees and in rivers! Delegates were hosted by local families. There were no disposable plastic cups, plates or utensils; we ate out of gourds prepared (and decorated!) for the occasion. We bathed in the rivers and had our meetings in the shade of trees. Prefiguration is a keystone in the arch of the Ecosocialist International. Yet it is not Puritan; its officers must guardians and not guards, who recognize that our internal contradictions are those of the world we traverse. The nature of our struggle is to dive into these contradictions; between the people we are and the people we must become, between the world we live in and the world we must bring to life. The future congresses of the Ecosocialist International shall strive to prefigure and honor the embryo of a new society in the womb of Mother Earth. As the first point of its Route of Struggle reads: “We acknowledge the gathering which founded the First Ecosocialist International in the Cumbe of Veroes as a reference point for methodology and social relations: it has been based on an exchange of experiences which allowed communities and peoples to recognize each other, and cradled healthy collective living and apprenticeship with other cultures based on mutual aid and respect. For these reasons we propose that this experience and method be replicated as much as possible in the future encounters of the First Ecosocialist International; in the fulfillment of its Plan of Action and on its Route of Struggle.”
Another important aspect of the Ecosocialist International’s methodology has been a pluricosmovisionary perspective.(2) In the preparatory gathering of 2016, after arriving at the articulation of this perspective, we were up almost all night deliberating how to implement it. A methodology of collective construction – where very voice is heard and registered – demanded that we break up into smaller groups. But how? We are accustomed to the logic of conferences; one group discusses mining, another agroecology, a third indigenous sovereignty, and a fourth women’s liberation… But in this way we replicate the epistemological schizophrenia of capitalist modernity, and we do not arrive at the holistic understanding or practice necessary to confront the system as a whole.
At last a solution revealed itself; our form of organization would be nature’s itself. We divided into the five elements – water, earth, air, fire and aether; or the milk, body, voice, energy and spirit of Mother Earth – understanding and insisting that all the elements of our struggles and solutions are interrelated and integrated. And as the elements would orient one axis, time would orient another. We then synthesized the many themes of discussion into a spiral, expanding to encompass the short, medium, and long term – the calendars of struggle, construction and utopia. The radical idea, as expressed in the convocation, was that delegates would divide themselves into groups not just based on issues and practices, but something deeper – “being and feeling.”
Pledging permanent communication between ecosocialist individuals and movements of all countries, our membership may be small at first. But if the Ecosocialist International nurtures solidarity in immediate struggles on five continents, then its historic role is initiated if not fulfilled. Each adhering person and collective is sovereign, and this sovereignty is earned in practice; in the return to Mother Earth. What binds us together is our connection to the source, and our commitment to return to it.(3) These movements are not gears to be connected like a machine, nor are they wild animals to be tamed. We work towards the coherence of a true network in which no center predominates; a galactic spiral of spirals for the convergence of free forces.
Its program outlines the major features of the ecosocialist movement, leaving the important theoretical questions and answers to their truest and purest discovery and articulation in practice, interwoven on a planetary scale. To paraphrase Marx, the Ecosocialist International will not lead people on the path of return to Mother Earth – the path of return will lead them to the Ecosocialist International. Its plan of action does not dictate or impose any conditions of form or content on its adherents; it only requires a commitment to their end goal. This plan of action is not uniform, but unified. It is centrifugal in its quest for liberated horizons and centripetal in following the path of return to Mother Earth. Perfect theoretical solidarity is an illusion; the genius of the International is not a philosophical or economic system but the shared consciousness and empowered execution of all, on the universal path of return to the source.
WHAT? An Ecosocialist Mode of Production
The First Ecosocialist International is not a gathering which will pass quietly by and give way to the Second. It is the First insofar as nothing has existed quite like it before. Its goal, and the destination of its route, is nothing less than the global emergence of an ecosocialist mode of production; “gathering the forces of the five continents of the world to Reweave Pangaea.”
This world-historic purpose; to guard and guide into existence a new way of life from the ruins of a collapsing world-system, has theoretically novel aspects. To understand the plan of action, we have to learn new words: conuco, trueke, maroon, and more.
At the founding of the Third International, Lenin predicted that if all the peoples of the world understood the meaning of the word “soviet,” then the world revolution would be assured. We may repeat and reflect that if the whole world may understand the meanings of the words conuco, maroon, trueke, and others like them, then the emergence of ecosocialism may be guaranteed. These words, defined in the plan of action, are passwords not only a mode of production but moreover its social relations of production; forms of unalienated, freely associated and communal labor.
First of all, this means stepping outside the ‘single vision’ of Eurocentrism. Where previous Internationals were anti-capitalist, the First Ecosocialist International is anti-colonial, and this is reflected in a commitment to a mode of production premised not on fulfilling the stages of capitalist development, but on a return to the source. This entails turning the whole idea of progress – often as dear to Marxists as it is to liberal or conservative capitalists – upside down. For these are not new words but old ones. An ecosocialist mode of production will not be designed on a rejection of a primitive past, as a communist mode of production was often imagined. Over and over, the plan of action repeats “the return to ancestral cosmovisions and practices.” It imagines the revelation and reintegration of the ancestral forces and relations of production prior and contrary to colonization. An ecosocialist mode of production will begin where it left off – with an alliance of the conuco, the milpa, the chacra and allyu, et. al., and their respective relations of production. “We are radicals,” the plan of action insists, “we shall return to our roots and our original ways; we shall see the past not only as a point of departure but also as a point of arrival.”
But we will not substitute blind allegiance to the future and modernity with a blind allegiance to the past or the primitive. An ecosocialist mode of production will be a fusion of the ancient and the contemporary. The plan of action seamlessly incorporates a University of High Technology with calls to evaporate urine in the sun rather than contaminate water. If Lenin argued that communism = (soviet power + electricity), we may propose that ecosocialism = (maroon power + solar panels) x (conuco power + 3d printing) x (trueke power + wifi).
Speaking of Lenin, he insisted that “every day, in one context or another, you will be returning to the question: what is the state?” And here is the right place and time to ask: what is the attitude and approach of the First Ecosocialist International to the state? What role will the state have in what the plan of action calls “the migration to an ecosocialist mode of production?” Here again, the program is not uniform. Marx and Bakunin and their followers shipwrecked the unity of their First International on the question of the state. Shall we do the same? The Ecosocialist International has no official theory, but some tendencies and currents may be observed.
The complexities of an ecosocialist understanding of the state were navigated in the convocation of the First Ecosocialist International, in which grassroots movements lead and elements of a revolutionary state followed. In Venezuela today a constitutional revolution and a Bolivarian process has begun to transform the state, and has laid the legislative and ideological foundations for its further transformation. Moreover it seemed to be popular sentiment in the rural afro-indigenous Venezuelan landscape that the fulfillment of Chavismo and Bolivarian process would be the demolition of the bourgeois and colonial state, and the emergence of a communal state, along with a new socio-territorial order on a continental scale. However, needless to say not all the delegates shared this capacity to affect legislation, to say the least. Venezuela is a very particular case; most of us are engaged in immediate life-and-death struggles with the state, and find it impossible to imagine that we should get out the vote as a path to revolution or return to Mother Earth.
The conquer political power was supposedly the great duty of revolutionaries in the 20th century. Today the only lasting basis for survival, let alone political power, is the economic, political, and spiritual return to Mother Earth. The locomotive of the nation-state cannot take us to this station. But it is blocking the path. By ballot or bullet we may seize a state. When it can take us no further we may be rid of it. This is the many-gated path to political power, and from this perspective the loss of state power by the left in Latin America in recent years is not the beginning of the end but the end of the beginning. The state is a prodigal son of Mother Earth, which has sought to usurp her power and worship. Our path of return to Mother Earth must traverse the state, by any means necessary, but must not become lost in its many labyrinths. The Ecosocialist International invites all on this path who are not lost to follow Ariadne’s thread, away from the minotaur and back to free life.
WHY? Spirituality
The First Ecosocialist International differs from all previous Internationals in its affirmation of a revolutionary spirituality. On one hand the question of why is simple; as it is written in the preamble, “We confront a contradiction: restore life, or lead it to extinction. We must choose.” But ours is not a utilitarian commitment to bare life. Infused in every part and process of the Ecosocialist International is a resounding spirituality. Its plan of action is meant to be not only revolutionary but redemptive; attending to the liberation and care of society and classes, and also of individual souls. It intends to restore and reclaim what Marx called “the heart of heartless conditions,” to redeem and resurrect “the soul of a soulless world.”
This emerges most obviously in the centrality of Mother Earth. In the convocation, ecosocialism is defined as one of her many voices.(4) This understanding and practice of ecosocialism is quite distinct from that discussed in the conferences of the global North, who tend unfortunately towards recapitulating the puritanical atheism of the eurocentric left. However it is a natural expression of a spiritual ecosocialism which has been defined and defended for decades by the original authors of the ecosocialist manifesto, Joel Kovel and Michel Lowy.
The foundation and program of the First Ecosocialist International is a covenant for “an exodus from capitalist modernity” – a covenant with Mother Earth, recognizing as hers the many and myriad ways of being and feeling, which should neither pull her apart nor be forced into any single rope to bind her, but interwoven carefully and creatively. Mother Earth is the spiritual center for this program, which reaches out in all ways and at all speeds to so many horizons.
The Ecosocialist International is an invocation and an invitation. In 2016 and 2017, the gatherings began with ceremonies in which ancestors were called upon and honored. Mother Earth is a universal source and horizon at which any and all faiths and religions may converge. With Christian, Muslim and Jewish, along with Yoruba, Marialioncero, Lakota, Wayuu, and other indigenous spiritualities and syncretisms present among the participants, it is very much a spiritual as well as a political alliance. In this it fulfills a function imagined by Abdullah Öcalan; “a confederation of global sacrednesses and moral studies.”(5)
Our greatest guide is Mother Earth and the course of herstory itself. Our responsibility is merely to recognize and record the circumstances which have been aligned to our collective purpose. As we did not conceive the First Ecosocialist International like architects with blueprints, it would be folly or betrayal to credit ourselves with its subsequent successes. There are no leaders but the spirits of nature, who embody themselves in us when we are worthy of their greater weave and wisdom. The founding delegates were not sorcerers but apprentices. We bear witness to the alchemy that transmutes pain into power, which leads the world to war and extinction and yet in the same course opens wider the possibilities of peace and rebirth.
WHERE? Venezuela
History appears first as a series of random or even accidental occurrences, which later reveal themselves as the results of a lineage and a logic, and which later still appear inevitable. So it came to pass that the First Ecosocialist International was convoked and constituted in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Of course it didn’t start there, nor will it end there. Not hatched by a theory, it is the offspring of the irrepressible tendencies of nature. As Jai Sen has written, “these movements are…. an integral expression of the pulse and life of Mother Earth as a living being… like waves, they are only surface expressions of much deeper currents in the rivers and oceans of our lives.”(6) The Outcry of Mother Earth and the contest between extinction and evolution are neither local or national but global problems embracing all countries, and depending for its solution on the convergence of the continents. The return to Mother Earth is a program encompassing all societies, convoking the concurrence of all ecosocialist movements, organizations and processes.
But the movement had to culminate somewhere. A variety of circumstances brought it to Venezuela; a plan of government (the first in the world) which explicitly incorporated ecosocialism; a corresponding grassroots mobilization, in particular around seeds and against GMOs. The success of a national grassroots ecosocialist movement in passing the first anti-GMO and anti-patent seed law written by farmers in the world, and a dozen years of building an international network of Guardians of Seeds, helped prepare the soil in which the idea of an Ecosocialist International took root.
Critiques have and will continue to arise contrasting Venezuela’s oil extraction with its commitment to ecosocialism. These contradictions are not dirty secrets in Venezuela, but open debates which find frequent expression in the Ecosocialist International’s plan of action. Rather than despair over these contradictions, we may remember Bertold Brecht, who insisted that “in the contradiction is the hope.”(7) Venezuela’s ability to usher in an ecosocialist mode of production is no more held back by the fact that it is a rentier oil economy, than Russia or China were held back (from feudalism to the space age in a generation) by the fact that they were feudal agricultural economies. Indeed, as the enforced underdevelopment of Russia and China were a historical foundation for a dynamic and rapid leap into the future, so the excessive urbanization and oil dependency of Venezuelan political economy could provide the background to a leap towards an ecosocialist horizon and solar communism.(8)
This consciousness of this possibility is lamentably eclipsed today by the ongoing comprehensive media war against Venezuela. It may be useful to recall in this context the media war which was waged against the International Workingmen’s Association. Marx reported to the General Council in 1872 about “the war of calumny undertaken by the lying power of the civilised world…. all the sluices of slander at the disposal of the venal respectable press were opened at once to set free a deluge of infamy in which to drown the execrated foe. This war of calumny finds no parallel in history for the truly international area over which it has spread, and for the complete accord in which it has been carried on by all shades of ruling class opinion.” This sounds a lot like the protracted media war against Venezuela.(9) With this historical reference, perhaps we may better understand the similarly coordinated media war against Venezuela, alongside with the ongoing military encirclement in Colombia, Brazil and the Carribbean, as Marx did in the same report – “the involuntary homage paid by physical force to moral power.”
As the fascist Venezuelans who call for a US invasion and burn people alive are glorified as freedom fighters by the US and European media, tens of thousands of people are engaged in building ecosocialist communes. The question of whether small farmers can feed a country is being answered, and with allies in the cities they are leading from below a migration out of the inherited political economy. If it is difficult to see or smell the truth through the spin and smoke of this media war, history will absolve Venezuela and reveal that the First Ecosocialist International was founded in that country because there it found its cutting edge. If it confronts great contradictions, this only proves that it is breaking new trail and charting new terrain. Venezuela was declared an “extraordinary and unusual threat,” by Obama, and he was right. Venezuela is a threat because it resists. Now that “the Ku Klux Klan government of the United States,” is tightening the noose, the solidarity and substance of the First Ecosocialist International may be tested.
The current war on Venezuela, the deaths of Chavez and Fidel, and the global crisis of greed, has instructed the movements of Mother Earth of their “duty to master themselves the mysteries of international politics.” Thus an unprecedented task in the history of revolution has fallen to the Venezuelan ecosocialist movement – determining the best organizational form and strategic/tactical orientation for ecosocialism in a country where rentier extractivism and bourgeois colonial state are still dominant… How to constitute ecosocialist power when the state is suspended in a tug of war between a paramilitary and proto-fascist bourgeoisie and reformist Chavistas?
Despite and because of these contradictions, history has chosen and gradually reveals its reasons. We seem to have entered a dialectical storm season in world history, in which the inter-penetration of opposites bud and blossom all around. Thus the origins and apogees of patriarchy in Mesopotamia witness the Women’s Protection Units; thus settler colonial destruction in the USA gives birth to unprecedented indigenous unity at Standing Rock; thus femicides in Mexico culminate in Marichuy; thus an oil country with the highest rate of urbanization on its continent gives birth to the First Ecosocialist International. Meanwhile, necessity is the mother of invention, and the ongoing economic crisis catalyzes a return to ancestral forces and relations of production. While this has been compared to Cuba’s special period, an ecosocialist politics may understand this not only as a period to be survived, but as an antechamber and threshold to a new mode of production.
With Venezuela rests and rises the glorious task – to paraphrase Marx’s words to the National Labor Union of the United States – to prove to the world that now at last, popular power bestrides the scene of world history no longer as a servile retainer but as an autonomous actor, conscious of its own responsibility, and able to command peace where its would-be masters shout war.
Here is where! And here is everywhere: a Plan of Action for here and now, and a Route of Struggle which spans the world, with paths connecting hotspots for decolonization, towards Pan-African and Pan-Asian summits, from which to glimpse the far horizons of Pangaea.
WHEN? Russian Revolution Centenary
We live in times of defeat and disintegration. After the global uprisings of 2011, we have experienced a “solidarity of defeat” perhaps comparable to 1848. Thus the First Ecosocialist International was convoked, like its predecessors, in a moment of universal danger, when revolutionaries on all the continents have recognized the need for convergence and higher expressions of international solidarity.
While it was not planned, neither was it an accident that the founding of the new International happened on the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. That event which changed the course and even the meaning of world history, reverberates still, both in its victories and its defeats.
As Trotsky argued to commemorate the founding of the Third International, so it may be of use to repeat and/or paraphrase: For without exaggeration it must be said – the whole world situation is determined by the crisis of ecosocialist leadership. Fascism today (Macri/Modi/Temer/Duterte/Trump/Putin/et.al.) is the only form of government possible when the bourgeoisie has lost the capacity for leadership, and the ecosocialists have not yet acquired it either. The Ecosocialist International thus announces its urgent purpose.
This purpose will be proved just as it was revealed; on the stage of world history. We will look back and compare the uprisings of 2011 with the revolutions of 2023, and find such prophecies proven or perished. In the meantime, the First Ecosocialist International is coming to a horizon near you. Get ready: Now’s the time!
Endnotes:
(1) “The First Ecosocialist International: The plan and case for climate reparations,” by Abraham Mwaura, forthcoming.
(2) From the Plan of Action: “The logic of the system which murders life is cunning; it robs us to feed itself, and disguises itself to continue existing. To escape from this logic and its ability to constantly recycle itself, we have decided to adopt a pluricosmovisionary perspective…. Pluricosmovisionary: A plurality of visions of the cosmos; a perspective which goes beyond the “multidisciplinary” or the “transdisciplinary,” which combine the perspectives of various disciplines, but within the same western and academic epistemology.”
(3) See “Return to the Source,” by Amilcar Cabral. Also see Joel Kovel: “The realization of ecosocialism flourishes in proportion to the degree of contact with nature as an original source of power.” (The Emergence of Ecosocialism, March 2017)
(4) “Ecosocialism is one of the voices which responds to the cry of Mother Earth, one among many convocations which emerge from our territories. Ecosocialism is a calling in which many others are evoked and resound; one of the many ways to name the pain of Mother Earth, which claims us, names us, and challenges us to change.” (The Cry of Mother Earth)
(5) “we should renew the way we understand the social role of morals, and the fundamental moral teachings should come together against the attacks of the capitalist modernity for success. Against the monsters of the civilization and modernity that are trying to engulf all sacrednesses and moral teachings, it is a requirement to establish a Confederation of Global Sacrednesses and Moral Studies.” (“Democratic Modernity: A Perspective for Today,” by Abdullah Öcalan, Contesting Modernity Conference, Hamburg, April 2017; see www.networkaq.net )
(6) The Movements of Movements, Part One, edited by Jai Sen, PM Press, 2017, pages 17-19
(7) For more on the contradictions of the ecosocialist revolutionary process in Venezuela, see “The Transition to Ecosocialism,” by Quincy Saul, Fourth Congress of Biological Diversity, Paraguana, 2013.
(8) “An Ecosocialist Horizon for Venezuela: A Solar Communist Horizon for the World,” by David Schwartzman and Quincy Saul, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2014.
(9) With an interesting exception – Pope Pius IX helped lead the media war against the International Workingmen’s Association, calling it an “enemy of God and Mankind,” while today Pope Francis defends the Venezuelan government’s calls for dialogue and peace.
