Green Anarchy or Eco-Socialism: an online debate on scale and tactics 

Monday, September 12, 2022

4 PM Central Europe/Africa, 10AM Eastern Time 

FREE

Register Now: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/green-anarchy-or-eco-socialism-a-debate-on-scale-and-tactics-tickets-384215708527

Benjamin Sovacool— energy and climate change scholar, Editor of Energy Research & Social Science, University of Sussex, United Kingdom, and Aarhus University, Denmark

Matthew T. Huber— Eco-Socialist and Marxist Geographer, Author of Climate Change as Class War (Verso 2022), Syracuse University

The facilitator is Alexandra Köves, an ecological economist, associate professor at the Institute of Operations and Decision Sciences at Corvinus University, Budapest, Hungary, and host of Economics for Radicals. 

Time and again neoliberal techno-capitalism has demonstrated an inability to address global challenges such as the climate crisis. Two movements, which have been called Green Anarchy and Eco Socialism, share a similar urgency and critique on the role techno-capitalism and fossil capital are playing in global ecocide, but there are substantial differences between them.  

Green Anarchists and other “small is beautiful” advocates aspire to empower local communities through mutual aid in a decentralized response to societal and ecological collapse, while those who identify as Eco-Socialists are focused more on harnessing the coercive power of the state for a centralized intervention that will transform society at national and ultimately international scales.

Acknowledging that both perspectives have a substantial diversity of views within them, this debate will focus on the essential differences, including scale and tactics to transform society, between the communitarian/anarchist and more centralized socialist approaches. The schism and polemical war between them has the potential for undermining the already daunting challenge of disrupting the techno-capitalist juggernaut that inevitably prioritizes profits over people and planet. 

To discuss and debate the commonalities, differences and potential synthesis between localized Green Anarchy and more centralized Eco-Socialist interventions, this special debate will explore: 

• How does the emphasis on scale and tactics differ in these two approaches and why does it matter?

• Can anarchists/localists and socialists/Marxists find synthesis to counter the fossil capitalism status quo, or will the ideological clash continue? 

• Will the differences between the approaches further fracture efforts to transform society or find resolution and become a path toward rapidly reducing climate and other global risks and increase societal resilience?

Monday, September 12, 2022

4PM Central Europe/Africa, 10AM Eastern Time

FREE

Register Now: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/green-anarchy-or-eco-socialism-a-debate-on-scale-and-tactics-tickets-384215708527

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