ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of and insights into the new frontiers of environmental justice politics in South Africa. Such politics have been made in struggles against the extractivist logic of South Africa’s carbon capitalist economy. They have featured struggles in support of workers’ health, pollution, and sickness in communities. Class, race, gender, and ecological interconnections have been foregrounded. At the same time, in the context of the worsening climate crisis, environmental justice politics have become climate justice politics. The intellectual interventions clarifying the dangerous climate contradiction and their rendering in Anthropocene discourse show how the climate crisis is part of ongoing carbon capitalist accumulation. Such macro-analyses and contentions are related to how actually situated carbon capitalism is constituted and organized through South Africa’s minerals-energy complex. Understanding the reproduction of this coal-based complex is crucial for ecosocialist analysis in South Africa. This provides a fresh impulse in the renewal of socialism as democratic ecosocialism. Moreover, the historical socialist imagination in South Africa (revolutionary nationalist, social democratic, and Soviet socialist) have all been productivist and anti-ecological. The emergent critique of these socialisms is highlighted and connected to actual ecosocialist struggles in the country. Besides mapping some of these struggles, the chapter concludes with a reflection on the challenges facing democratic ecosocialist politics in South Africa.
