How popular is ecosocialist transformation?
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Unequal exchange
15 min read
The article explicitly mentions 'ending imperialist appropriation from the global South through unequal exchange' as a core ecosocialist proposal. This economic theory explains how wealthy nations extract value from poorer ones through trade relationships, providing crucial context for understanding the global dimension of ecosocialist critique.
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Degrowth
12 min read
Degrowth is a central concept in this article, with the study specifically testing public reactions to the term. The Wikipedia article provides the intellectual history, key theorists, and policy proposals behind this movement that the article discusses but doesn't fully explain.
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Means of production
13 min read
The article references 'democratising control over finance and the means of production' and 'removing the capitalist class from control over... the means of production.' This foundational Marxist concept is essential for understanding the political economy arguments being made.
How popular is ecosocialist transformation? We explored this question in a new study, just published in The Lancet Planetary Health together with colleagues at the London School of Economics.
We surveyed more than 5,000 people in the UK and US, using representative samples and two separate study designs. We presented people with a full proposal for eco-socialist transformation, which included the following:
scaling down damaging and unnecessary production and consumption
cutting the purchasing power of the rich, and reducing inequality
establishing universal public services and a public job guarantee to reorganise production around needs
democratising control over finance and the means of production
ending imperialist appropriation from the global South through unequal exchange
We found that this vision enjoys strong majority support in both countries. In the US, 72% of people supported it, and in the UK support was even higher at 82%. These are striking results, and confirm other studies showing popular support for many of the principles and policies associated with ecosocialism.
Next, we wanted to understand how people respond to various labels that may be used to describe this transformation, so we presented people with standalone words including “degrowth”, “ecosocialism”, and “well-being economy”, without any description. Here I will report results for the UK, but the US results are similar.
We found that “degrowth” was supported by 20-26%, depending on the study, but also attracted a lot of opposition (16-34%).
“Ecosocialism” had higher support, at 36-58%, and much lower opposition (11-16%).
“Well-being economy” had even higher support (51-81%) and very minimal opposition (more on this later).
In our final step, we gave people the full proposal but this time together with the various different labels. This enabled us to understand whether and how the use of different labels affects people’s support. We found that support was high regardless of the label, with strong majorities: 67-72% in the US, and 74-84% in the UK.
So what can we make of all this? For me, here are the main takeaways:
First, the transformative vision and policies advanced by ecosocialism are popular and can form the basis of a winning political campaign. The common notion that these ideas are too “radical” and cannot gain support, is clearly wrong. People want these things, and are likely to support political leaders who can credibly promise to deliver them. The main obstacle to transformation is not popular will, but the capitalist
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