Two weeks ago, we published an article entitled Beyond Worker Democracy; Towards Degrowth Socialism by Michael Ross. This piece provides an excellent summary of the fundamentals of the philosophy of “degrowth socialism” as espoused by Kohei Saito. Ross’s conceit, shared by many proponents of degrowth socialism, is that the framework of “workers’ democracy” is an insufficient one for the revolutionary socialist movement to operate within because it does not, without external intervention, resolve the contradiction between human civilization and the natural environment, a contradiction which has led to massive ecosystem destruction and the threat of world-ending climate change. I happen to agree with the general principles of degrowth socialism, but I take issue with the way its theoretical innovations are often presented. The intent of this article is to put forth a comradely critique of Beyond Worker Democracy and its framing of the tension between workers’ democracy and eco-socialism—a tension I propose does not meaningfully exist. Socialism need not go “beyond worker democracy,” because a fully-realized democratic workers’ republic necessarily implies a sustainable and harmonious relationship between humanity and the rest of the biosphere. Far from surpassing the republican struggle, “degrowth socialism” actually entails a continuation of that struggle to its logical conclusions. The old Bolshevik slogan “democratic revolution to the end” is as good in the age of Kohei Saito as it was in the age of Vladimir Lenin.

Republicanism is often falsely reduced to its political dimension, misconstrued as merely the ideal of government by popular consent. Popular sovereignty, or political democracy, is indeed a crucial foundation of the republican struggle. But the notion that political democracy is the end-all, be-all of republican thought is in fact a distortion originating with liberalism, the rival ideology emerging out of the Enlightenment. The true foundation of republicanism is the idea of freedom from domination in all its forms. Before the liberal bourgeois took command of the revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the republican petty-bourgeois or plebeian elements sought to march beyond the political sphere and resolve the social question—in Marxist terms, to revolutionize the relations of production. For domination exists in the social sphere as well, after all, the domination of one class by another has historically occurred through economic exploitation, whether in the form of slavery, serfdom, or wage-labor. The aim of republicanism has always been to bring about both a political republic and a social one.

That is not to say that republicanism and the democratic struggle are substantially different, or that the social republic is different in content from a fully-realized workers’ democracy. Freedom from domination in the social sphere must mean equal say of all in the process of production, which can only be practically achieved through the democratic principle of one person, one vote. That is to say, the social republic is indistinguishable from a workers’ democracy. But democracy is more than just voting; the results of democratic decisions must be binding. We can therefore say that a true republic entails, along with the whole host of political freedoms, an economy managed on the basis of collective decision-making according to a common plan. The workers’ democracy comrade Ross describes—one where individual workplaces or even whole industries are managed democratically by their workers, but where these cooperatives or syndicates still operate on market principles—is no workers’ democracy, no social republic, at all. The working class cannot be said to have realized economic democracy if the “invisible hand” still guides production and exchange in the absence of a common and binding economic plan, and it is not free from domination (even having overthrown capitalist managerial relations) if it is still subject to the impersonal domination of the market.

I propose that the realization of the republican ideal entails answering a third question, beyond the political and social: the ecological. Freedom from domination must mean an end to human domination of the environment. After all, where did all political and social systems of domination contained within that leviathan we call “class society” come from? Human division of labor calcified into what became the first class structure with the invention of agriculture, which created, for the very first time in our history as a species, a consistent caloric surplus, meaning communities of humans could remain fed without all of their able-bodied members actively doing the feeding. From there, roles specialized, new categories of human aside from hunter and gatherer emerged—weaver, potter, etc.—leading to the emergence of rudimentary markets. A means of accounting then became necessary, leading to systems of writing (and therefore scribes, later clergy) and money to rationalize increasingly complex patterns of exchange. With the birth of money came its conjoined twin, the labor-value form, for only labor-time could exist as a common account of the relative value of all possible goods and services. At the same time, human communities became sedentary, giving birth to cities and then the armed forces necessary to defend them and the grain stores kept within. The invention of agriculture directly gave rise to the basic dynamic of extraction of surplus value from labor and the instruments necessary to maintain said dynamic, namely the written law and organized force of arms. The agricultural revolution, which set humans apart from all other forms of life and birthed the domination of nature by humankind, also birthed class society. The origin of all forms of political and social domination lies in the advent of ecological domination.

This is not mere metaphysics. Like Hegel’s master-slave dynamic or Aime Cesaire’s colonizer-colonized dynamic, the relationship between humanity and the environment is dialectical; the consequences of our domination of the environment reflect back onto us and cause us to reproduce structures of domination amongst ourselves, structures like capitalism, which then in turn bring our domination of the environment to new and apocalyptic extremes. The struggle to prevent the natural environment from falling into the maw of industrial capitalist hell is not merely adjacent to the struggle to realize the republican ideal, it is part and parcel to it, because ecological domination is the form of domination that preceded, spawned, and continually reproduces all others. Complete human liberation can never mean the freedom to extract and consume as much as we like at the environment’s expense, but must instead mean our liberation from the inhuman systems that compel us against our own interests to turn our only home in the universe into our collective tomb.

Just like slavery and colonialism could not have been reverted to the pre-slavery or pre-colonial status quo, we cannot overcome ecological domination by undoing it. A return to a preindustrial, nay preagrarian society is impossible. Instead of being erased, the contradiction between humans and the natural world must be resolved by our revolutionizing of how we reproduce ourselves as a species and civilization. We must usher in a new mode of production along with new patterns of energy harvesting and agriculture. And yes, we must move towards degrowth. But to do any of that, we must win the battle for democracy and bring about a democratic workers’ republic.

Promising efforts are being made towards that end as we speak. In Cuba, the boldest experiment in political democracy in human history exists side-by-side with radical innovations in sustainable agriculture through agrarian cooperatives. In Bolivia, the Movimiento al Socialismo has begun to democratize the state with a new constitution that, among other things, affords indigenous nations the right of democratic self-determination, while simultaneously granting the natural world itself inviolable legal rights through the “Law of the Rights of Mother Earth.” Even at the heart of the empire, in the United States, social movements raising democratic demands have become entwined with the movement for environmental justice. Flashpoints like Stop Cop City in Atlanta and the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in Sioux territory are illustrative. But the battle clearly isn’t won. As socialists, we must defend the gains already being made by comrades from Cuba to Bolivia against our own country’s imperialism and join our comrades here in America in their struggles for peoples’ self-determination, abolition of the police, and other democratic demands that are merging with ecological struggles in real time. These struggles are at the front lines of the current stage in the fight for the total republic—the fight for communism.