A Historical Sketch of Socialism

This chapter is a brief overview of socialism, from its beginnings in the 1800s to the time of writing, including the kinds of socialist variants that eventually gave rise to ecosocialist perspectives. Knowing some socialist history is useful towards understanding not only the development of, but also the substance of and currents within ecosocialism. After all, ecosocialism is a response to other forms of socialism, past and present. It is a perspective traceable to social movements originating in the 1960s within liberal democracies, where it is still mainly confined. But it also grew out of leftist opposition to the specifically neoliberal variants of capitalism prevailing by the late 1970s.