Work-in-Progress: A People’s Environmental Paradigm

A People’s Environmental Paradigm: Law, Class Struggle, and The Inside/Outside Strategy

Abstract

In an era of intensifying ecological breakdown, as quantified by the surpassing of Earth’s planetary boundaries, traditional environmental law “reform” constitutes an insufficient model. We instead require deeper system change, or systemic “re-formations,” of our ecological political economy as a whole. Drawing on the insights of critical environmental legal theory in the ecosocialist tradition—i.e., which centers multiracial and internationalist class struggle—this Article proposes novel mechanisms to achieve such change: transformative iterations of the “inside/outside strategy.”

As conceptualized in this Article, inside strategies view environmental law as contingent and as a partial terrain of radical class struggle. Outside strategies work beyond the law entirely to build extra-institutional class power. Inside/outside strategies, moreover, are designed to work together in potent and dual-reinforcing concert. As a concrete illustration of the inside/outside strategy, this Article proposes novel iterations of “Green Universal Basic Services” as a liberatory legal and policy regime as entwined with extra-institutional power-building modes (e.g., “Green People’s Assemblies”). Ultimately, such an inside/outside strategy works towards a genuinely radical paradigm—a people’s environmentalism—as required in our era of Anthropocene crisis.