Crisis in the Carolinas: The Lowcountry and Climate

By Erica Veal and Karl Malone

Republished from Hood Communist.

Africans are largely left out of conversations about environmentalism, despite the fact that we suffer from the triple threat of climatic, environmental and human rights crises. Our communities bear the brunt of the climate catastrophe, and this is especially true in the South Carolina Lowcountry where sea level rise threatens to wash away our Gullah Geechee homelands. Our relationship to environmental racism stretches back to the emergence of the local phosphate mining industry in the 1860’s and manifests today in the disproportionate exposure of Black and low income residents to environmental hazards. Today, Gullah Geechee communities disproportionately neighbor hazardous waste sites like landfills, sewage plants, incinerators and manufacturing facilities. Add to this gaping racial disparities rooted in the region’s history of chattel slavery, and it becomes clear why Black people should be the vanguard of the environmental movement.

Cooperation Jackson and the Black Environmentalist Movement

When people think about environmentalists, stereotypes about white, tree-hugging hippies come to mind. For Black environmentalist Kali Akuno, co-founder and co-director of Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi, it is important for Black people to challenge these stereotypes by taking charge of the environmental movement. As someone who has closely followed the climate crisis, he calls attention to the fact that by 2050 the large portions of the Black Belt will be underwater if the predictions of environmental scientists are accurate. The Black Belt refers to the crescent shaped strip of fertile land in the Southeastern United States which has historically been home to an almost unbroken chain of majority (or near majority) Black counties stretching from Virginia to East Texas. It is the historic homeland of Africans trafficked to North America to build the wealth of this nation during the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade and where the majority of their descendants still live today. According to Akuno, the land millions of Africans in North America currently occupy is some of the most vulnerable to climate change and, as such, Black people are most likely to be displaced as a result of climate change induced natural disasters. The rising costs of housing means finding new homelands for ourselves may prove an insurmountable task, which is why our stake in the environmental movement is so high.

Sitting less than 20 feet above sea level, Charleston, South Carolina is extremely vulnerable to sea level rise. For Gullah Geechee residents, the constant flooding, brought about by regular storms and unusually high tides, exacerbate the racial disparities we face. Flooding causes transportation delays and can mean missing work. It also causes property damage for residents whose homes flood constantly, as is the case for several public housing projects across the Charleston peninsula. Wading through flood waters can mean exposure to raw sewage, which can lead to adverse medical outcomes, medical expenses and the list goes on. For Black residents on fixed incomes, many of whom live below the poverty line, flooding is a constant nuisance and it’s only getting worse.

In the few weeks of lockdown we experienced during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic we saw how quickly the environment regenerated albeit temporarily. Industrial emissions dropped, the air became cleaner, as did waterways, migratory patterns of wildlife improved, and the list goes on. We saw that change is possible, but we live in a capitalist system that puts profits before people and the planet. We cannot afford to be silent and sit idly by while billionaires and private corporations continue to pollute our world and the people living on it to enrich themselves. Akuno says we’ve already surpassed the worst case scenario according to many climate models. Therefore to “curb ecological destruction,” Black people have a compound responsibility to organize against the systems that oppress us and take climate change seriously.

Learning from Cuba’s Fight Against Climate Change

We don’t have to reinvent the wheel in our effort to fight the climate crisis. We can learn from places like Cuba, a majority African, island nation in the Caribbean, that is largely the most sustainable country in the world. Cuba has embraced environmentalism like no nation has. It is the only country to meet the World Wildlife Fund’s definition of sustainable development. Its government has implemented policies to reduce the waste of natural resources and minimize its carbon footprint in the form of a successful 100 year plan to combat climate change called Tarea Vida (Life Task). Tarea Vida includes a ban on new home construction in potential flood zones, the introduction of heat-tolerant crops to cushion food supplies from droughts, and the restoration of Cuba’s sandy beaches to help protect the country against coastal erosion. Cuba is a leader in the environmental movement and all while struggling under an unjust and deadly 60+ year economic blockade imposed by the United States government.

Cuba underwent a successful, largely Black-led socialist revolution in the 1950’s, freed itself from the imperialist exploitation of the United States and naturalized its resources. In addition to leading the environmental movement, Cuba leads in medicine (sending doctors all over the world), has eradicated illiteracy, subsidized housing and food, has universal education from pre-K to PhD and is a shining example of what the world could be if we put people before profits. Although socialism in Cuba poses no threat to the United States, the government has kept the blockade in place and caused shortages in food, medicine, gas and other essential items at the expense of the Cuban people. Most recently, under the Trump administration, Cuba was added to the State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT) list, further exacerbating shortages on the island.

In the face of all this, there are many parallels around the climate crisis between Cuba and Gullah Geechee communities in the South Carolina Lowcountry, e.g. soil erosion and sea level rise are clear. Additionally, when considering the racial disparities faced by Gullah Geechee people (and the entire Black Belt region), it is as if we, too, are living under a form of economic blockade. Africans in North America are more likely to face food and housing insecurities and less likely to have access to quality schools, day care, health services, and a living wage. We are more likely to be exposed to environmental hazards that expose us to adverse health outcomes and all of this is a direct result of the choices made by our bought and paid for government officials, both democrats and republicans alike. Yet, Cuba, the socialist capital of the western world, has shown us things do not have to be this way. For these reasons and more we should actively organize against the US economic blockade and the removal of Cuba from the SSOT list. The future of Gullah Geechee communities may literally depend on our ability to learn from Cuba’s people centered policies and innovations in environmental science.

Environmental Racism in North Charleston

The socio-economic state of the Gullah Geechee people is daunting and stretches back to the era of slavery. Africans in North America were never meant to be anything more than a source of cheap labor for Europeans to exploit. We were kidnapped, enslaved and trafficked here for our knowledge of rice agriculture and we transformed the landscape of the Southeast Atlantic coast from a vast expanse of Bottomland Hardwood Forests to a seemingly never ending complex of rice fields working in some of the harshest conditions as chattel slaves. As a result, Charleston became the richest city in colonial America and with the the largest slave port on the continent.

After the Civil War ended in 1865, phosphate mining became the most successful form of industry in the Lowcountry, replacing the major agricultural and textiles industries that could no longer be sustained due to the loss of the free labor of enslaved Africans. Since calcium phosphate was discovered in the beds of the Ashley River, it provided former the enslavers who owned this land an opportunity to “recoup some of their financial losses after the Civil War” by either selling their land, leasing it out to mining companies that began forming everywhere, or establishing mining companies of their own. The increasing demand for labor was quickly filled by newly “freed” Gullah Geechee people, who dominated this industry due to their being locally available and accustomed to working in the sub tropical Lowcountry climate.

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY!

Though the rise and fall of the phosphate industry in South Carolina lasted roughly 20 years, the long term damage to the environment is still being felt today. This period marked the beginning of a long history of environmental racism in the Gullah Geechee community. Studies show that “exposure to these harmful conditions results in negative health outcomes, stressed communities, and reduction in quality of life and neighborhood sustainability.” The Environmental Protection Agency has identified many of these old mining and processing locations as hazardous waste sites. One such waterfront site in North Charleston, could potentially be developed into another heavy industrial boat manufacturing facility, but Black residents are actively fighting against this.

In 2015, the Charleston County Park and Recreation Commission (CCPRC) acquired the former Baker Hospital site off Azalea Drive in North Charleston with the intention of developing the 57 acre property into a waterfront park. It has since leased 11 acres to a local company called Sea Fox Boats. According to an online petition circulated in March 2024, although “The City of North Charleston has zoning in place that will keep industrial uses off of the park property,” CCPRC applied to change the zoning to either heavy or light industrial to accommodate their new lease agreement. CCPRC claims profits from the tenant will fund the environmental cleanup and development of the remaining 46 acres park site while representatives for Sea Fox claim the manufacturing plant will bring jobs to the community. Black residents like KJ Kearney, from communities surrounding the proposed park site, are pushing back on this saying they already have jobs and this segment of North Charleston has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the area. Others have said they don’t need or want heavy industry in their communities, particularly on a site that is already contaminated because of decades of industrial use. Jobs won’t matter if residents are sick from exposure to contaminants and they don’t want jobs that will lead to the death and destruction of the environment.

While North Charleston’s city planning commission voted to deny CCPRC’s recommendation to rezone the site in March, the ultimate decision is up to city council. On Thursday, April 18th, 2024, Black residents again voiced their concerns at a public meeting saying they felt left out of the decision making process. Yes, residents want a waterfront park in that area of North Charleston, but not at the expense of exacerbating environmental conditions and hazards. The controversy surrounding the Baker Hospital site is an example of environmental racism at its best. While proponents of Sea Fox push the narrative of job creation, Kearney says, “the community is not against jobs” rather they are against the idea that “the only value historically Black communities have to their city is as a labor force.” He went on to talk about how the plant will produce tons of hazardous air pollutants and that, for a community which ranks” in the 95 percentile for asthma,” that is a risk they cannot afford to take. He suggested that the paternalistic framing of the situation by Sea Fox supporters is clear– Black people should be grateful for the opportunity to work for a rich white man who wants to invest in their communities and simply ignore the impact of the plant on their quality of life. After a long and heated meeting, the council voted to postpone making a decision on the rezoning for another 60 days so the council can gather more information, but the people who live in this area have made their position clear.

While the city council in North Charleston is mostly Black and so is the new mayor, that is not enough to ensure the will of the people is carried out. The masses of Africans in the Lowcountry must continue to actively organize against this type of blatant environmental injustice to mitigate damage to our communities and the environment. We already suffer tremendously under the crushing weight of capitalism and its partners in crime (racism, white supremacy, sexism, gender bias, etc.), but this isn’t just about us. We know the success of our liberation struggles benefit all oppressed people. If we don’t act, the climate crisis will be the death knell that marks the permanent destruction of our communities. None of us will be free until all of us are free, but what use is freedom on a dead planet?

The authors represent the Lowcountry Action Committee, a Black led grassroots organization dedicated to Black liberation through service, political education, and collective action in the Lowcountry.

Sources

1. Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi, edited by Kali Akuno and Ajamu Nangwaya

2. “Is Pollution Poisoning Charleston’s African American and Low Income Communities?” https://charlestoncitypaper.com/2016/03/09/is-pollution-poisoning-charlestons-african-american-and-low-income-communities/

3. “Free the Land w/ Kali Akuno” Hood Communist Radio https://open.spotify.com/episode/789OXvt1LdjEJ5e8pFCMUp

4. The Black Belt Thesis: A Reader by the Black Belt Thesis Study Group

5. “Flooding Intensifies Charleston Region’s Racial and Wealth Inequalities” https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/flooding-intensifies-charleston-regions-racial-and-wealth-inequities

6. Could Covid lockdown have helped save the planet? https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/29/could-covid-lockdown-have-helped-save-the-planet

7. Cuba’s Life Task: Combatting Climate Change documentary by Helen Yaffe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APN6N45Q6iU

8. “Consequences of a Blockade of Cuba” 23 April 1962 Central Intelligence Agency https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP79R00904A000800020016-7.pdf

9. “The State of Racial Disparities in Charleston County, South Carolina, 2000–2015” https://avery.charleston.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/The-State-of-Racial-Disparities-in-Charleston-County-SC-Rev.-11-14.pdf

10. History of the Corridor: Industry https://ashleyriverhistoriccorridor.org/history/industry/#:~:text=In%201883%20over%203%2C000%20African,well%20as%20state%20convict%20labor

11. History of the Corridor: Bulow/Long Savannah https://ashleyriverhistoriccorridor.org/sites/long-savannahbulow-plantation/

12. “A History of the Phosphate Mining Industry in the South Carolina Lowcountry” http://nationalregister.sc.gov/SurveyReports/hyphosphatesindustryLowcountry2SM.pdf

13. “Baker Hospital site to become a new county park” https://www.postandcourier.com/archives/baker-hospital-site-to-become-a-new-county-park/article_0630e058-999d-5de4-9319-5addea566537.html

14. “Public input process to start this winter for Charleston County Parks’ North Charleston Ashley River Site” https://www.ccprc.com/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/Item/1423

15. “Preserve the Former Baker Hospital as a Park” https://www.change.org/p/preserve-the-former-baker-hospital-site-as-a-park?original_footer_petition_id=35513102&algorithm=promoted&source_location=petition_footer&grid_position=15&pt=AVBldGl0aW9uAEWcQgIAAAAAZe1wynNJJ%2BAxMzdmNTMxMQ%3D%3D

16. “N. Charleston argues plans for former Baker Hospital site, fate in council hands” https://www.live5news.com/2024/03/12/n-charleston-argues-plans-former-baker-hospital-site-fate-council-hands/

17. “Delay in North Charleston zoning decision fuels frustration over old Baker Hospital site” https://abcnews4.com/news/local/delay-in-north-charleston-zoning-decision-fuels-frustration-over-old-baker-hospital-site-south-carolina-wciv-news-4

Internationalism Today: An Interview with Paweł Wargan

By Daniel Benson

Republished from Monthly Review.

What does a progressive foreign policy look like today? How should we understand imperialism? What is at stake in reclaiming an internationalist political horizon for the left? What forms of organization are best adapted for a new international? Given the many contemporary global challenges—such as climate change, far-right extremism, pandemics, and the increasing threat of nuclear war—it is urgent to develop a strategic, organizational, and theoretical perspective for the international left. Paweł Wargan discusses these and other questions in the interview that follows. Researcher, activist, and coordinator of the secretariat of the Progressive International, Wargan is well suited to highlight the prospects for a new internationalism today. The interview is conducted by Daniel Benson, assistant professor of French and Global Studies at St. Francis College and the editor of Domination and Emancipation: Remaking Critique (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2021).

Daniel Benson: I’d like to begin with a discussion of your overall political perspective and development. What are some of the main events or intellectual influences that have impacted your current writing and activism?

Paweł Wargan: I worked in public policy when the last great wave of climate activism emerged. Every Friday, I would make my way through crowds of protesting schoolkids to get to work. Occasionally, some would block the roads. What struck me was that the ideas expressed in these spaces carried a clarity, a creativity, and an urgency that I never saw at work—where ideas were staid, unambitious, never coming close to addressing the urgency of the moment. So, I took to the streets.

You learn through struggle. You build confidence through struggle. You begin to articulate the reasons for your struggle and develop a feel for the possibilities it opens. The great challenge, I learned over time, is that it’s not enough to have good ideas. In large parts of our movements, demands for “system change” resolve into a politics of advocacy that focuses on appealing to existing institutions rather than building new ones. The very form of these protests—they are often held outside government buildings—speaks to that relationship of supplication. We entreat our ruling classes to deliver something that is not in their power to deliver. And we become despondent when we fail. This reflects a poverty of imagination, which has been carefully cultivated by the ideological machinery of capitalism.

Not long after, I had what you might call a eureka moment. I was working on a long report that envisioned what a green transition might look like in Europe. One day, I was editing a section submitted by an Italian architect. In it, he argued that to build sustainable cities Europe needed to shift to prefabricated, high-rise apartment blocks surrounded by parks and public amenities. I was living in Moscow at the time, on the fourteenth floor of a prefabricated high-rise apartment block surrounded by parks and public amenities. I looked out the kitchen window and wondered: What was this society that, many decades ago, began to build the future we are only now envisioning? That led me to study processes of socialist construction.

Fidel Castro once said that when he first read The Communist Manifesto, he began to find explanations for phenomena that are typically explained in terms of individual human failings—moral failings. He began to understand, he said, the historical processes and social processes that produce both great wealth and terrible immiseration. You don’t need a map or microscope to see class divisions, he said. I think about that often. What Castro meant—and what you learn from reading revolutionaries like Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V. I. Lenin, Walter Rodney, and others—is that there are observable processes of contradiction and class antagonism that shape the world. The job of the left is not to hover above these processes and preach progressive ideas. This is the domain of idealism, of liberalism. You can’t build the future with ideas. You can’t repair the environment with ideas. You can’t feed the hungry with ideas. Our job is to build power through struggle, at every step seeking to institutionalize that power, building structures that can realize the aspirations of the people. That is what the great processes of socialist construction—past and present—teach us.

DB: I agree that building institutions on the left is vital. I think there is an increasing consciousness among left-leaning thinkers, activists, and scholars of the need to focus on organizational issues, on strategy, on building power, and not merely on symbolic gestures or purely theoretical problems. But recent history has shown the difficulty of creating lasting institutional change: from the anti-World Trade Organization protests of 1999 in Seattle to the Iraq War protests of 2003 to the Occupy movements of 2011. Moreover, even when leftist parties can organize and achieve political power at the national level (for instance, Syriza in 2015), they have proven incapable of challenging dominant global institutions. Or, turning to the Global South, progressive projects have struggled to freely develop (Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, among others) in large part due to U.S. imperialism.

I’d like to turn, then, to the question of internationalism and how it relates to building power on the left. I feel that many individuals, students, and even progressive activists see international politics as distant from their everyday life or local struggles. This is very different from, say, the long 1960s, where resistance to the Vietnam War, decolonization, and socialist construction were seen as interrelated and part of the same struggle. Could you explain, first, why internationalism is important to building progressive, leftist institutions? And, second, why you propose the Third International, or Communist International, as an important resource to rebuild internationalism in the contemporary moment?

PW: There is a story I have heard repeatedly—the cast changes, the setting changes, but the story stays roughly the same. Moved by the exploits of Che Guevara, an enthusiastic U.S. socialist travels to Nicaragua. He visits the encampments of the Sandinista movement, which is waging armed struggle against the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship. “I want to join your struggle,” they say. “What can I do to help you?” The response is blunt: “Go home and make a revolution in the United States.”

The answer tells us two important things about internationalism.

First, the struggle of the Sandinista movement does not occur in isolation. It takes place against the backdrop of overwhelming U.S. imperial violence, which is the international extension of its oppressive, racist, and colonial politics at home. In the 1980s, Nicaragua was subjected to an economic and military blockade. Its harbors were mined. The Contras—a fascist force that massacred hundreds of thousands of people across Latin America—were covertly armed and trained to destroy the aspirations of the people. There was a very real need to sever the threads that bound Nicaragua’s brutal immiseration with the prosperity of the U.S. ruling classes—and that necessitated building a revolution in the United States.

Second, the construction of a revolutionary process is in itself an internationalist act. What can you do for the people of Haiti, or the people of Cuba, or the people of Western Sahara, or the people of Palestine, or the people of Venezuela as an individual, without first building power? Can you send them a tanker of oil? Can you send them a container of medical supplies? Can you help them build modern industrial capacities—or support their green transition? The degree of our collective power at home, and the political orientation of our movements, dictates the shape of our commitments abroad.

In 1918, Lenin wrote a piece railing against those who sided with their governments in the First World War. In privileging the “defense” of their countries over the overthrow of those responsible for the war, he wrote, these forces substituted internationalism with a petty nationalism—backing a predatory capitalist and imperialist leadership against the imperative of peace and social revolution. In the end, Lenin said, the position of the Bolsheviks was vindicated. The October Revolution generated the ideas, strategies, and theories that came to power a global revolutionary movement. Like messengers from the future, the Russian people pierced through the terrors of capitalism, and revealed a path forward.

Turning that path into a highway was, to a great degree, the mission of the Third International. Through it, Lenin said, the nascent USSR would lend a “helping hand” to peoples seeking emancipation from colonialism. That mission was born from a thesis that echoes in our story from Nicaragua. The thesis is that European capitalism draws its strength not from its industrial prowess, but from the systematic looting of its colonies. That same process both feeds and clothes the European working class, suppressing their revolutionary aspirations, and generates the material power that sustains their exploitation. The police forces, prisons, weapons, and tactics tested and honed in the colonies are always, after all, readily turned against workers back home. The primary duty of internationalism, then, is to strike at capitalism’s foundations: colonialism and imperialism.

These ideas carry great weight in our time. Whenever we—ensconced in the comforts of the imperial world—advance ideas for the reform of the capitalist system, we are effectively saying: “We don’t care that over two billion people go to bed hungry. We don’t care that hundreds of millions already live in a wrecked climate. We don’t care for the people who suffocate under the weight of our sanctions. Their plight doesn’t concern us.” The theories of the Third International teach us that the power of our ruling classes is the mirror image of the immiseration of the great planetary majority. Now, as countries and peoples begin to assert themselves against U.S. hegemony and its drive towards nuclear and environmental exterminism, our task is to build power with the grain of that historical process—not against it. Now, more than at any point in human history, is the time to build a revolutionary struggle grounded in clear anti-imperialist politics.

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY!

DB: Let’s turn to concrete organizational questions of how to build such a revolutionary movement. The late Marxist scholar and activist Samir Amin was an active participate in organizing across borders and bridging the divide between the Global North and Global South. Amin called for launching a “Fifth International” in 2006 or a “New International” just before his death in 2018. The latter call generated important discussion among scholars, theorists, and activists about how best to “do” politics in the context of neoliberal globalization. Much of the debate revolves around two issues: (1) the longstanding debate on the left of finding the right balance between a “horizontalist” perspective (democratic, pluralist, non-hierarchical, open to various ideological tendencies) and a “verticalist” one (strict criteria of membership, centralized decision-making); and (2) what is the right or appropriate level (local, national, international, global) at which to organize.

What are some of the organizational challenges and successes you’ve encountered in your own experience building left internationalism today?

PW: Organization is simply the way in which we store and instantiate our collective capacity to act—coming into contact with others, forming communities, building confidence, and making the strategic and programmatic decisions about the future that we want to build.

How helpful is the distinction between the “horizontal” and the “vertical”? In my mind, those who reflexively privilege the “horizontal” over the “vertical” cling to the view—cultivated to a great extent in the anti-communist project—that the outcomes we want can spontaneously materialize without us actively pursuing them. That when things become bad enough, the anger of the masses will translate into change. Instead, as movements have repeatedly learned, a commitment to extreme “horizontalism” operates as an obstacle to unity and provides fertile ground for the emergence of invisible hierarchies that immobilize and breed discontent. Equally, organizations that are sometimes derided as “vertical” made tremendous leaps in what we might now call inclusivity. For the first time in history, Lenin’s Comintern brought the demands of women, anticolonial movements, national liberation movements, Black liberation movements, and others under its banner—translating diversity into collective power grounded in a shared analysis of the political situation.

We need to build institutions prepared to address the profound challenges that confront humanity. What are these challenges? In his proposal for a new international, Amin described the U.S.-led imperialist system as totalitarian. I side with Domenico Losurdo in questioning the integrity of that concept, but in this case it is perhaps uniquely appropriate. Capitalism and imperialism sever our connection to the productive process, to nature, to other human beings, and to our own imaginations. We become trapped in a world of imposed ideas, imposed structures. The history we learn, the clothes we wear, the possibilities that we ascribe to the future—these are not ours. They form through the operation of capital accumulation at the global scale, a process that we sometimes euphemistically describe as “globalization,” but which is more accurately understood as imperialism. Extreme violence has been wielded—and continues to be wielded—to preserve this system. Its primary function, as Amin reminds us, is to preserve the “historical privilege” of the colonizers to pillage the resources and exploit the workers of the Global South. But the system is not inevitable.

Marx and Engels devoted their lives to showing that historical processes are not arbitrary. They have motor forces that can be studied and whose movements can be charted. The interaction of these forces generates tensions, or contradictions, that manifest in different ways at different times in our history. Revolutionary processes that ended the enslavement of human beings gave way to a new system of economic organization in which the primary contradiction was between workers and factory owners, or, elsewhere, peasants and landlords. History has shown that these contradictions can be overcome, but only through the collective efforts of the people. This cannot happen spontaneously, and it cannot happen if we cling to the false belief that the previous system can be redeemed or reformed—that a fairer slavery is possible, or that a fairer imperialism is possible. So, one of the primary tasks—and challenges—of the internationalist is to break through the structures of alienation that imprison our minds, our bodies, and our societies.

What does that mean in practice? It means creating the conditions by which peoples and movements from disparate parts of the world can learn from one another and become aware of one another’s fundamental interconnection—overcoming, for example, the idea that the struggle of the Amazon warehouse worker in the United States is separate from the struggle of the garment worker in Bangladesh. When we buy a pair of jeans on Amazon, we wear the labor of the textile weaver in Dhaka. And in that labor, we find the sources both of our collective power and of Amazon’s monopoly power. Our power exists in the socialization of production, in the fact that manufacturing is a collective process and a set of social relations that can be disrupted or captured by the organized working class. Amazon’s power is born of the surplus value generated by its capacity to exploit, dispossess, and plunder, both at home and abroad—a “historical privilege” currently protected by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the 800 U.S. military bases that circle the globe, a sanctions regime that suffocates states seeking to embark on paths of sovereign development, and other infrastructures of economic and military coercion.

But understanding is one part of the puzzle. Sloganeering, however radical, can only take us so far. How can we help build the trade unions in Bangladesh, who are resisting international capital and its agents in government? And how do we politicize the popular movements in the United States that hold the capacity to sever imperialism’s grip on the rest of the world, but largely eschew anti-imperialism as a political horizon? There is a dynamic interplay here between the local sites of organization and action, the transnational networks that seek to unite and coordinate that action in a programmatically coherent way, and the global horizon, where the framework of imperialist globalization reveals to us the threads by which our struggles are connected. The geographic scale of action must dynamically respond to the conditions it confronts. That is why, to me, an International must be a laboratory of political action—grounded in a comprehensive theory of the political and economic conjuncture, faithful to the historical tradition it builds upon, but not dogmatically wedded to this or that organizational template.

DB: I’d like to ask you a question about language and terminology. Specifically, the difficultly in effectively framing and articulating a left internationalist laboratory you describe. Since the rise of neoliberal globalization, which kicked into high gear after the dismantling of the Soviet Union, the very vocabulary of internationalism itself has given way to terms like global justice, global citizenship, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism. These terms are all palatable to a world in which nation-states have become subordinate to global finance. Such terms have seeped into progressive social movements, NGOs, institutions of higher education, and United Nations entities, at least in part to disengage and disassociate from, or simply reject, an entire history of internationalist struggle that you touched on earlier. What is at stake in reclaiming internationalism as a political horizon today?

PW: The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński—among my earliest political influences— compared history to a river. On the surface, he said, the water moves quickly. Beneath the surface, the flow is steadier. Similarly, events pass us by quickly, but in their multitude we can observe stable structures and patterns of thought, which change over long historical epochs. I start here because internationalism carries within it concrete traditions of thought and action that we derive from Marxism, which contain within them a view of the river’s slow undercurrent.

The most important of these is dialectical and historical materialism, an analytical method that teaches us to train our eye not on individual events, but on the movement of history. The dominant philosophy of our time compels us to see only the surface of the river, only the quick succession of events. But these events pass us by with astonishing speed. We struggle to discern patterns, we become overwhelmed. Unable to situate developments in the world within their proper context, we begin to suffer from amnesia. We forget our history. Our creativity is imprisoned because we lose the ability to relate our actions to reality. And our politics resolve into idealism: we believe that a just world can be imagined into being; that our system can be transformed by gradual reform; or that nothing can really be done. Rodney outlined three features of this bourgeois perspective. First, it purports to speak for all of humanity rather than a particular class—the logic that says, “we are all in this together.” Second, it is highly subjective, claiming universal truths while concealing its ideological commitments—just look at the entire field of economics! Third, it refuses to acknowledge contradictions.

Marxism repudiates these notions. It teaches us that historical movement is a product of contradictions between and within things. You cannot have poverty without wealth, a proletariat without a bourgeoisie. The position of these classes reflects their relationship with the material world, with the means of production. The ideas that each group subscribes to also relate to their material environment, to their class position. Idealism is the philosophy of the bourgeoisie, while communism is the philosophy of the workers and oppressed peoples. And central to the communist tradition is the idea that collective human effort can resolve contradictions in favor of the oppressed. In his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, Marx wrote that “philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.” Marx was not just a thinker. He founded the International Workingmen’s Association, the First International, which emerged in part from textile workers’ opposition to British involvement in the U.S. Civil War. At the time, Lord Palmerston’s government was plotting to intervene on the side of the Confederacy. The workers of Britain saved Western Europe, Marx said in his inaugural speech to the First International, from plunging into “an infamous crusade for the propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic.” The conviction that we have the capacity to change the world—that it is our duty to change the world—is inseparable from the tradition of internationalism, which is a communist tradition.

Today, with their imaginations stymied by old, unchanging ways of thought, many organizations do not set out to change the world, because they do not exist in the world. They do not exist among children who struggle to eat, or the workers who struggle to make ends meet, or the peasants dispossessed from their land. They are bourgeois in their makeup. So, they subscribe to categories of thought that hold little relevance for the hungry, the poor, or the dispossessed—and the institutions they build do not serve the interests of those for whom the world must change. The language they use is a product of their class commitment, and one that has been carefully cultivated: the substitution of movements for liberation with NGOified sloganeers is an instrument of demobilization. It shields the status quo by institutionalizing bourgeois ideology.

In a sense, then, everything is at stake in reclaiming internationalism as a political tradition—and I have a very optimistic view of our prospects. Liberalism has not, cannot, and will not find answers to the complex crises facing humanity. But, from the violent, ceaseless flow of events that confront us, internationalism helps us recover sight of history’s laws of motion, and of the peoples and movements that are its engines. It reveals to us the ways in which our struggles and experiences are connected across borders, and the class dynamics that shape them. Even if they have yet to take hold, the ideas of internationalism, of socialism, are alluring to many precisely because the prevailing ideology is not ours. But, where bourgeois thought fails us, socialism shines a light through capitalism’s darkness, reclaims the past from its amnesia, and recovers hope from its futurelessness. These are our traditions, and we have nothing to fear in proclaiming them.

DB: My last question is on how to formulate a progressive, anti-imperialist foreign policy. At the end of Marx’s inaugural address you mentioned, Marx affirms that the working classes recognize “the duty to master themselves the mysteries of international politics; to watch the diplomatic acts of their respective governments; to counteract them, if necessary, by all means in their power.” Today, a lot of mystery, or deliberate mystification, swirls around international politics, not least the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Among the anti-imperialist left, the debate tends to turn on how to understand imperialism. Should imperialism be seen in the singular, as predominately U.S.-led; or are there multiple, competing imperialisms, such that Russia, China, and the United States would all be equally imperialist powers? How does this debate impact the development of a coherent foreign policy for the internationalist left today?

PW: What is imperialism? In the intellectual tradition of the left, it refers to a situation in which capitalist economies mature, the rate of profit falls, and corporations begin to look abroad for resources to extract and labor to exploit. This is the same dynamic that sees small “Main Street” businesses grow into chains, then regional conglomerates, and then into national and ultimately international monopolies. The laws of capitalism demand that expansion. Companies that fail to grow are pushed out of business or bought up by others. Then, state power is wielded to turn sovereign nations into export markets, sources of cheap resources and labor, and outlets for investment for these corporations.

Today, the United States has a degree of power that is incomparable to any empire in human history. This is a product of a particular historical moment that I situate at the end of the Second World War. Having lost 27 million lives to defeat Nazism, the Soviet Union was in tatters. Europe was ruined. China, having faced an even longer war at the heel of a century of colonial subjugation, faced a desperate situation. But the United States emerged not only unscathed, it emerged economically and militarily strengthened, cloaked beneath the terrible aura of the atomic bomb, giving it something resembling omnipotence in the international arena.

How has it wielded that power? From the very beginning, it has wielded it to suffocate humanity’s aspirations for sovereignty and democracy. In the late 1940s, the people of Korea rose up against feudalism and the brutal U.S.-backed dictatorship of Syngman Rhee, which operated death camps for suspected communists. In response, the United States destroyed the north of Korea, killing roughly a quarter of its population and destroying 85 percent of its buildings. It threatened to use nuclear weapons on several occasions. This holocaust has largely been written out of history—and its victims are now the subject of vicious and routine derision by those who sought to erase them. If you ever wondered what the world might look like had fascism prevailed, look no further than the U.S. destruction of Korea.

Then came Iran in 1953, Vietnam in 1961, Guatemala in 1954, Congo in 1956, Vietnam in 1961, Brazil in 1964, Indonesia in 1965, Chile in 1973, Nicaragua in the 1980s—the list goes on and on. Wherever the United States arrived, its parasitic capitalist model of globalization followed like a cancer, suffocating states’ capacities to respond to the needs of their people. Tens of millions of lives have been claimed by direct or proxy violence instigated by the United States, and many more from the effects of being subordinated to the U.S.-led imperial system. Roughly five million people die each year because they do not have access to adequate healthcare—a problem that socialist projects have largely eliminated. But socialism is not allowed in the U.S. template for humanity.

We may ask a counterfactual, then: How might the world look if the United States had not picked up imperialism’s mantle after the Second World War? The defeat of Japanese imperialism and the German colonial project in Eastern Europe—and we must insist on its recognition as a colonial project—severely weakened the colonial powers. It set off a process that saw the British and French empires shrink dramatically. It inaugurated a new, modern consensus for humanity, with the adoption of the UN Charter and the pursuit of decolonization. It gave great prestige to the project of state socialism. The United States pushed against these currents—against the movement of history—and built a global system through which it exerts, at the barrel of a gun, near-total financial, cultural, and political power over the vast majority of humanity. No country in history has a comparable military footprint or proven capacity for destruction.

Attempts to downplay or relativize this violence are an insidious form of apologia. More often than not, accusations of, say, “Chinese imperialism” are rooted entirely in the hypothetical: “China is building infrastructure that could allow it to become a new imperial power.” In this case, the “twin imperialisms” thesis serves to put on equal footing an unsubstantiated conjecture with the actual violence of imperialism—it puts a moral claim on equal footing with an empirical fact. As the historian Vijay Prashad has remarked, we are afraid of Huawei’s 5G towers because we are told they could be used to spy on us, but we are unconcerned by the actual spying that is carried out by the U.S. government, which Edward Snowden and others have revealed. What is this but another red scare, scaffolded in our culture by the increasingly virulent Sinophobia manufactured by the United States and its allies? There are also more surreptitious forms of this on the left: attempts to “redefine” imperialism and cleave it from its analytical tradition to make it more suitable to the particular moral commitments of the day.

This phenomenon—the denial of imperialism—is infantilizing. It confuses left strategy, because it severs our ability to relate to the actual processes of history. It immobilizes, because in a world where everything is bad, nothing is possible. And it risks producing a moment in which, as U.S. violence against China escalates, forces on the western left will side with their own blood-soaked ruling classes rather than build power against them. Guarding against these impulses is among the most important tasks of the day. The moment has arrived for us to heed Lenin’s call to turn the imperialist war into a war on the bourgeoisie that suffocates us.

Note: A French version of this interview was published by the Association Nationale des Communistes on September 18, 2023.

From Genocide Denial to Climate Denial: How Palestine Will Save Us

Pictured: Protestors hold a rally for Palestinian liberation at the Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., on November 4, 2023. [CREDIT: CELAL GUNES / ANADOLU / GETTY IMAGES]

By Sarah Cavarretta

“I have a cause higher and nobler than my own, a cause to which all private interests and concerns must be subordinated.”

- Leila Khaled, October 30th, 2023

On November 8th, the Palestinian Youth Movement, National Students for Social Justice in Palestine, Answer Coalition, and the Peoples Forum NYC organized Shut it down for Palestine, a national strike of students, healthcare workers, trade unions, and youth coalitions. This national strike followed weeks of demonstrations from tens of thousands of protesters in the United States. From youth groups blocking the Tacoma port in order to stall ships carrying weapons destined for Israel, to Jewish Voice for Peace organizers blocking all White house entrances and conducting sit in’s at Grand Central Station. The momentum is undeniable and global. This is the type of dual power, coalition building, and defiance of social participation we must regularly exercise in society.

In the past few months, the world has witnessed mass demonstrations of millions of people occupying public space to express their support for Palestine’s liberation. Indonesia had 2 million people occupy public space in protest of Israeli occupation. And over 1 million people marched in Washington D.C. demanding a cease fire. From Egypt,  Turkey,  The United States, and even Costa Rica, masses of people from all around the world recognize the brutality of this 76 year old occupation.

In less than two weeks, Israel has dropped over 20,000 tons of of explosives, surpassing the explosive force of nuclear weapons used on Hiroshima Japan in 1945. A total of 10,000 bombs dropped on a people without an military, in a swath of land only 6 miles wide and 25 miles long, with a population of 2 million people, half of which are children. Gaza, which is one of the most densely populated cities in the world, has not had access to water, food, or medicine for over a month, with no end in sight. Even with our best attempts to pause and reflect on the experience of 10,000 bombs in the first 12 days alone, the horror is unimaginable.

The sickening reality is there are multiple genocides occurring right now. From the Congo and Sudan to Palestine, the trivialization and misinformation of each of these examples is an extension of the broader denial that we are living through a mass extinction at the behest of private corporations.

Subduing the Masses

“The parallels are undeniable,” 800 scholars and legal experts wrote in an open letter warning that the Israeli bombing of civilian infrastructure like churches, hospitals, schools, and entire neighborhoods, which predominately kill civilians, all constitute acts of genocide. Additionally, shutting off all water access and food supplies is defined as a war crime under “collective punishment.” In fact, in years prior to the Hamas attacks in October, various human rights experts and organizations have all legally defined Israel’s occupation of Palestine as an “apartheid state constituting a crime against humanity.” Yet, the insidious framing of corporate western media continues to trivialize the actual power dynamics of this occupation. With inaccurate headlines like  “Israel’s war on Hamas” or “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” corporate media deliberately side steps the reality that Palestine does not have a military or functioning state. They are a people occupied in what has been described as “an open-air prison” or “large concentration camp” under constant blockades and military checkpoints by Israeli forces that have been committing a gradual genocide for 70 years.

Similarly, in 2020, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued their most urgent report warning the the world that we are approaching a grave threshold of social collapse with global crop failure on the horizon if we do not enact “increased and urgent” policy that reduces global emissions by 2030. Yet media outlets reported on this as another aspirational statement rather than a critical intersection. The first IPCC report was released in 1990 and its findings have been buried, minimized, and mocked for decades.

In July of this year, various scientific reports warned we are witnessing the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, one of the ocean’s most important currents, literally vital for ocean life and our entire existence.

Yet, year after year corporate media has trivialized the catastrophic and harrowing trajectory we are approaching. This pattern operates ad nauseam: Climate scientists and activists are arrested for their public protest and outcry of irrefutable data, inckuding the fact that North America lost 1/3 of all birds within 50 years. Or that the global loss of pollinators is a clear precursor to unfolding food insecurity. Or that the global destruction of coral reefs signals irreversible damage. The media has responded to all this information with apathy because corporate media operates at the behest of advertisers whose interests run contrary to environmental sustainability.

We are living through the 6th mass extinction driven by human activity as the result of capitalist hyper-consumption and over-production that exploits and disregards water, land, and people for profit. It’s not enough to denounce neoliberalism, but rather we must also know the institutions and multinational corporations who profit from our suffering. Most of all, we must have the courage to acknowledge that institutions contingent on the production of human suffering are illegitimate and can not be reformed. They must, instead, be abolished. Whether its genocide denial or climate denial, our institutions deliberately employ nefarious framing to subconsciously subdue our urgency and understanding of clear identifiable catastrophes.

Co-opting the System

Political thinker Mark Fisher deconstructs the patterns and dualities of capitalism in his book Capitalist Realism. Most of the efforts towards resistance or “anti-capitalism” are predictable forms of counter culture, like two sides of a coin. “Anti-capitalism” becomes a dance with the system, but nothing changes.

This is because the actual boundaries of society remain the same. Therefore, the options society produces for “change” or "resistance” are often self-limited to begin with. Change cannot come from within the system, and this framework is imperative to utilize when understanding today’s global failure.

The system simply does not offer effective mechanisms of reform because those who control these systems benefit from these catastrophes. Instead, political systems and governments shaped by capitalism are designed to reproduce appeasement through the hijacking of legitimate movements and well-intended institutions, whether through political campaigns, environmental movements, or International systems.

We need to look no further than the U.N. Climate Change Conference, which is also referred to as the Conference of the Parties (COP). Today, the COP has been completely hijacked by the fossil fuel industry.

Since 2019, Madrid COP25 had more fossil fuel delegates than delegates representing any single country. By 2022, COP26 in Egypt had more fossil fuel delegates than 10 countries most affected by climate combined. This year, COP will be facilitated by a petrostate with more fossil fuel delegates in attendance than ever before.

This pattern of institutional hijacking is the solidified model of U.S. foreign policy. The Pentagon’s budget is over 1 trillion dollars every year, primarily awarding defense contractors and weapons manufactures (all private companies) with unchecked multibillion dollar contracts. All of which reinforces the never-ending rotation of former department of defense employees receiving high ranking positions in private companies like Halliburton, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin. Additionally, over 80% of military generals end up working for weapons producers.

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY!

Irrefutably, this revolving door corrupts and incentivizes a conflict of interest when former military personal are appointed jobs with the same institutions whom they’ve been giving inconceivable contracts to. Recalling that these private companies are financed primarily by U.S. tax payers, we must acknowledge that this model of wealth distribution for private corporations comes directly at the expense and well being of U.S. citizens, depriving them of everything from health care and education to affordable housing and healthy food.

The cycle of violence abroad is also repeated domestically through unexamined policies that only pursue perpetual warfare. This trajectory is contingent on the continued annihilation of people both abroad and domestically. And these sentiments are not hyperbole, as the majority of U.S. police departments conduct joint training with Israeli Occupational forces. The results are brutal police tactics, refugee children in cages at the border, and mass surveillance, all of which are imports of Israeli violence sponsored by the U.S. Thus, the brutality that the U.S. creates and empowers abroad is simultaneously implemented back home, and vice versa. Because, under capitalism, there is profit to be made from brutality.

Deconstructing Power

The average person might be inclined to think the United Nations (UN) is a toothless institution, but it is not. Rather, it is the largest consolidation of western hegemony ever expressed.

The UN is made up of 190 member countries. Out of 190, only 5 are permanent members that hold veto power. These 5 countries — the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China — also make up the United Nations Security Council, the only UN body that can issue legally-binding resolutions and has the exclusive legal right to possess nuclear arsenals.

To further demonstrate western hegemony, 3/5 security council members (U.S., U.K, and France) are also the world’s largest military coalition responsible for the majority of war crimes in the past 50 years. It’s imperative to identify this reconfiguration of colonial powers to understand the system is working exactly how it was designed: to grant unmitigated power to the western (capitalist) world. This current representation allows the most powerful countries to be judge, jury, and executioner, while also representing the most brutally offensive forces in the world.

Recalling that the United States has over 800 military bases around the world and has not signed or ratified the majority of human rights treaties, its obvious the U.S. and its allies operate with total impunity.

Take for example the case of the International Criminal Court, established post-WW2 as the only permanent court with international jurisdiction. The Rome Statue, the treaty which gives life and authentication to the ICC, explains in Articles (5) that the ICC has jurisdiction in all matters concerning: (a) The crime of genocide; (b) Crimes against humanity; (c) War crimes; and (d) The crime of aggression, and defines each in subsequent articles. Beyond these definitions, there are legal characteristics of crimes against humanity, such as the indiscriminate targeting of civilians and their infrastructure. This is a war crime for the same reasons that chemical and biological weapons are; because they have no singular target and predominately kill innocent civilians.

For the average person, this seems like a reasonable obligation for militaries. However, in 2002, U.S. President George Bush signed the American Service members Protection Act, a law that permits the “use of force” to invade the Hague in the event that a U.S. military member is ever prosecuted for war crimes.

Recalling that the ICC is a criminal court that only investigates the most egregious cases of war crimes, it is revealing that the U.S. already has a contingency law in place that justifies invading the Netherlands in the hypothetical scenario that its military forces are ever tried for war crimes.

In another demonstration of American exceptionalism and the disdain for international order, in 2020, Donald Trump canceled the visas and placed sanctions on ICC court prosecutors, Fatou Bensouda and Phakiso Mochochoko, for simply investigating U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan.

The lesson here is that there is no way to sequester the power of the United Stats within today’s international framework.

building Power

When we identify that international organizations are nothing more than colonial extensions and will play no role in our collective liberation, it is imperative we take creative and brave ownership of the world we want to live in. Just as every generation has done before us. The United Nations, which is unduly controlled by the capitalist/imperialist West, has brought us to our current demise. Its function is contingent on mass suffering and, therefore, it will never be constructed in a way to liberate the masses.

Society is collapsing, but the world is not ending… yet. Every revolution, liberation, and social movement reveal that collective organization and radical disobedience are the only way to dismantle violent institutions. From weapons manufactures and fossil fuels industries to big agriculture and agrochemical industries, each one operates from a profit incentive and are directly responsible for killing our planet and its people.

This language and understanding must be mainstreamed in order to galvanize a conscious awakening of the masses. There is no going back now, as Israel’s brutality and genocide have polarized the global majority against western governments. And the US is eager and waiting to wage full-scale destruction. The world must be prepared to mobilize against this. 

When we recall that the system of chattel slavery existed longer than it has been abolished, we must draw courage to believe that a new world is possible. Every generation is called to take radical ownership over the world they want to live in. It’s a constant fight that requires the participation of everyone, everywhere, all at once. It starts with building power within our communities.

These sentiments can not be platitudes. We must internalize this as we prepare for the horizon. No one is absolved from participating in our collective liberation. Our future depends on it, and it starts with Palestine.

Capitalist Urbanization, Climate Change, and the Need for Sponge Cities

[Pictured: State-level pilot district of Sponge City in Yuelai, Chongqing.]

By Tina Landis

Republished from Liberation School.

According to the United Nations Population Fund’s 2009 report, 2008 was the first time in history that over 50 percent of the world’s population resided in cities instead of rural areas. Because of the different ways countries define cities, others date the qualitative shift to as recently as 2021 [1]. Regardless, across the spectrum it’s undisputed we now live in an “urban age” and, as such, transforming the relationship between cities and the natural world is essential for climate change adaptation and mitigation. The international capitalist institutions like the World Bank that are increasingly taking up the issue of cities and climate change can’t explain the various factors behind urbanization nor can they pose real solutions to its impact on or relationship to climate catastrophes. Cities consume 78 percent of the world’s energy resources and produce 60 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2022 UN Habitat report [2]. Under the capitalist model, urban planning lacks a holistic approach, leaving human well being and ecological needs as an afterthought, which will continue to have a degenerative effect on the environment and global climate.

Marx and Engels lived during a time in which capitalist urbanization was a nascent phenomenon concentrated mostly in some European cities, like Manchester, the English city about which Friedrich Engels wrote his first and classic book, The Condition of the Working Class in England. Engels demonstrates how the “great town” of Manchester, the first major manufacturing center in England, was great only for capitalist profits. The concentration of capital required for the invention and adoption of machinery outproduced independent handicraft and agricultural production, forcing both into the industrial proletariat of the city. There, they had to work for the capitalists, whose wages were so low they could, if they were lucky, live in overcrowded houses and neighborhoods just outside the city limits. Because the city was produced chaotically for capitalist profits, no attention was given to accompanying environmental impacts [3]. As the masses were driven from their land into the urban factories, the ancestral ties to the land and ecological knowledge of how to live sustainably on that land was lost.

It was not the “industrial revolution” that produced the new sources of power needed for machinery, but the need for new sources of power that produced the industrial revolution. For the machinery required more powerful and reliable sources of energy than wind or the water wheel, animals or humans could provide. They were replaced at first by coal and the steam engine, “whose power was entirely under man’s control, that was mobile and a means of locomotion, that was urban and not, like the water wheel, rural, that permitted production to be concentrated in towns” [4]. Capital was thus not bound to any particular place and free to move and establish new “great towns” wherever they could accumulate the greatest profits, and with this came increasing detrimental effects on people and the planet.

Today’s crisis

We see the result of centuries of unfettered capitalist development in the climate crisis today. Atmospheric rivers, bomb cyclones, hurricanes, heat waves, and drought are all becoming more frequent and extreme with climate change. This summer, with the onset of El Nino, these extremes are amplifying [5].

The first week of July 2023 was the hottest week on Earth ever recorded, with one-third of the United States under excessive-heat advisories. Sweltering heat domes brought triple-digit temperatures across the northern hemisphere from the U.S. to Europe and Asia, while countries in South America experienced record-high temperatures during their winter months [6]. Annually, around 1,500 people die of heat-related deaths in the U.S. States, a count that is likely low since many extreme-heat deaths aren’t documented as such. As of early August, extreme heat in the United States had killed at least 147 people in just five counties in 2023.

As air and water temperatures increase globally, the frequency of extreme weather increases. In the 1980s, billion-dollar disasters occurred every 60 to 120 days on average. In the last decade, they have occurred every 20 to 30 days [7]. Intensifying extreme weather includes more extreme flooding and extreme drought, as the air and water currents globally are becoming destabilized due to the increasing heat in the atmosphere.

Cities were, generally speaking, built near rivers or coastlines. Often, wetlands and floodplains were drained and blockaded with dams and levees to direct water away from population centers. As flooding and drought increase with climate change, these systems are creating even more detrimental conditions in the short and long term.

The U.S. has experienced an urban flooding event every two to three days for the past 25 years, costing $850 billion since 2000. Heavier rains are causing flooding in many parts of the globe, and the eastern U.S. has seen a 70 percent increase in heavy rain events annually [8]. Sea level rise also contributes to flooding events. While the 6.5-inch increase in sea level in the United States may seem minimal, this increase impedes gravity-fed drainage from working during storms and high tides, bringing water into the streets.

Capitalist cities and the surrounding urban sprawl are major contributors to climate change and environmental degradation. The majority of the world’s cities today were built for profit and speculation in mind, with little to no consideration given to negative impacts on either ecology or humanity. They were premised on the idea that nature could be controlled and dominated instead of the proven conception that construction should work collaboratively with natural cycles. Vast hardscapes—sidewalks, roads, parking lots, buildings—and gray infrastructure that channels water away as it falls, places these urban centers at odds with biodiversity and the natural cycling of water through the landscape. Green spaces that are created within urban environments are often highly managed areas separate from the rest of the city, filled with non-native ornamental plants and thirsty grasses that require intensive irrigation, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides, while providing little to no benefit to native species of birds, insects, and others.

With climate change, the existing city-structures are becoming increasingly disastrous for all residents. The heat island effect that adds more warming to the atmosphere has accelerated deadly implications as the climate warms, making heat waves and droughts even more severe. Hardscapes, such as pavement, buildings, and rooftops, as well as bare earth, absorb solar radiation and continue to radiate heat long after the sun has set. Vehicles, air conditioning units, buildings, and industrial facilities also heat the atmosphere.

The heat island effect results in daytime temperatures in urban areas to be 1-7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than temperatures in outlying areas, and nighttime temperatures about 2 to 5 degrees higher [9].

What can be done? China leads the way

To cool and rebalance the climate, we need to not only eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, but also reduce ecological impacts and restore what has been lost.

Just 40 percent tree cover in a city can reduce temperatures by up to 9 degrees F [10]. Trees and other vegetation not only provide shade from the sun but reduce surrounding air temperatures. Plant leaves are like miniature solar panels and transform solar radiation into sugars and oxygen. Unlike human made structures, plants do not add heat to the surrounding atmosphere; they actually cool the atmosphere when they get hot by releasing water vapor

Water also has a cooling effect on the surroundings due to evaporation. When water bodies are integrated within the landscape they not only cool air temperatures, but also supply hydration to surrounding soil and vegetation, and recharge groundwater. Global heat dynamics regulated by water are between 75-95 percent, so creating more space for water throughout landscapes and urban areas is a key climate change mitigation tool.

Wetlands, floodplains, and bioswales act as flood prevention giving water space to flow and be absorbed into the ground when heavy rains fall, unlike concrete structures that increase the power of water and cause flooding downstream or down the coast from where these structures exist. By allowing water to pool within the landscape, rather than channeling it away into storm drains, rivers and oceans as it falls, makes water available during times of drought. Gray infrastructure flood control mechanisms often fail, with greater frequently in the U.S., which received a “D” on its Infrastructure Report Card from the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2021.

These increasing challenges from climate change are happening globally, but one country in particular is taking comprehensive action to address how urban areas impact the environment and how climate impacts are demanding more resilience in urban planning.

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY

China is one of the countries most severely impacted by floods globally due to geographic and environmental conditions, as well as experiencing increasing droughts and heat waves. To minimize the impacts of climate change, China has implemented their sponge cIty model that aims to retrofit and create 30 cities by 2030 as climate resilient population centers. At a cost of $1 trillion, or around $33.3 billion each, transforming these cities will save billions in annual flood recovery costs and save thousands of lives [11]. For comparison, the U.S. government spends $1 trillion annually just on military expenditures. Imagine what we could accomplish if those funds went to things like sponge cities that improve our lives and the health of the planet!

Sponge cities utilize green infrastructure so that surfaces act as a sponge absorbing water. They integrate space for water to collect such as wetlands and bioswales, create vegetative cover and trees throughout including green roofs and vegetation integrated into building structures, and porous pavement and roads so water can infiltrate soil and catchments underneath to be available during dry times. These cities have areas integrated throughout that have a dual purpose, such as parks adjacent to water bodies that can be enjoyed in dry times, which then act as wetland areas during heavy rains. These sponge cities can deal with four times the amount of rainwater than a normal city, reducing flooding by 50 percent. These cities, when complete, can absorb and reuse 70 percent of rainfall.

How the sponge city movement emerged

China, over the past few decades, has seen major achievements in development. From a mainly agrarian society at the time of the 1949 revolution, China has seen the rapid industrial growth and development of urban centers and has made great achievements in overcoming the legacy underdevelopment imposed by colonial and imperialist powers that the country was plagued with for centuries. At the time of the revolution, extreme poverty, floods and famine plagued the country.

Since that time, China has made major advances, improving the quality of life of the population. In 2020, China eradicated the last vestiges of extreme poverty through the mobilization of Communist Party cadres to the countryside to investigate the needs of the people and bring services and economic opportunities to those most in need [12]. This process which began in 1949 has lifted 850 million out of dire poverty, an unparalleled achievement for humanity.

Chinese culture has historically had a deep connection with nature and connection to ancestral lands. Through rapid development and misunderstanding of the environmental impacts, Chinese cities, as with most cities of the world, have created a separation of the people from nature.

Renowned ecologist and landscape architect, Kongjian Yu, has been the driving force behind the sponge city movement within China and globally, taking inspiration from traditional Chinese irrigation systems [13]. Yu recognized the shortcomings of China’s development path and spearheaded a new way of looking at cities – “big feet” versus “little feet” aesthetics and negative planning [14].

Little feet aesthetics references the debilitating foot binding practices of imperial China that viewed unnaturally small feet on women as beautiful. Yu compares this practice to modern China’s urban development, which often mimics western architecture and imperial Chinese styles with grand plaza and parks that do not serve the general population or ecological needs. These urban parks integrate exotic plants requiring intense irrigation and other inputs with little to no ecological or human benefits.

Yu instead promotes big feet aesthetics, creating green spaces throughout cities using native plants for all populations to interact with in their daily lives that integrate urban areas into the ecosystem rather than inserting a manufactured version of nature for aesthetics only. His argument for big feet aesthetics is to bring people and nature back into coexistence for the well-being of all, which also improves biodiversity and air and water quality, and cools air temperatures. These methods also alleviate flooding and drought, which are increasing with climate change.

Using big-feet aesthetics, Yu has led the eco-city and sponge city movements in China and leads similar projects across the globe. He first made his appeals to local leaders within China and later won over President Xi Jinping to the need to marry development with ecological sustainability. The need to address environmental impacts received broad support within China’s Communist Party which included the goal of building an ecological civilization in their constitution in 2012 [15]. Sponge cities are one of many tools that China is utilizing to achieve that goal [16].

How sponge cities aid in climate change mitigation and adaptation

Yu’s promotion of eco-cities and sponge cities stems from the concept of negative planning, which has its roots in the early Chinese practice of feng-shui and focuses on urban growth based on ecological infrastructure. Rather than a city with green space included here and there, Yu’s eco-city model looks more like a natural area with urban infrastructure woven in.

It is crucial with increasing droughts and floods for urban areas to allow space for water to sit rather than trying to drain it away, which in the end gives water more power and creates flooding in other areas. Slow water systems are being embraced globally as populations experience the negative impacts of gray infrastructure and rains become more intense and erratic.

While water consumption and waste must also be addressed, particularly regarding industrial agriculture and lawns—the single most irrigated crop in the United States—we must also shift away from gray infrastructure to green. Damming of rivers and draining of floodplains and wetlands, not only decimate river ecosystems and harm biodiversity, but inhibit the recharging of groundwater resources. Aquifers are being drained at an alarming rate and as the world warms, water resources are becoming scarcer [17].

Urban development, the creation of hardscapes, and the damming of rivers only continues this trend of a drying landscape, blocking natural water cycling that replenishes groundwater and supports biodiversity.

Yu’s projects aim to work with nature instead of against it, shifting past practices of creating parks as ornamental spaces to ones that mimic wild landscapes filled with native plant species. The use of native plants is crucial to conserve water resources in dry times by greatly reducing or eliminating the need for irrigation and creating a more climate resilient system. Birds, insects and other wildlife benefit from native plant species for food and shelter, increasing overall biodiversity, which in turn increases ecosystem resilience.

A few examples of how detrimental the introduction of non-native plants can be are the example of California and Hawaii. The recent wildfires in Maui were not fueled solely by climate change-induced drought, but also due to the introduction of non-native grasses for livestock feed that dry out quickly and become tinder during drier months [18]. The same is true in California, where early colonizers replaced perennial grasses (which have deep roots and stay green even through the dry season) with annual grasses for livestock feed, which die in early summer, drying out soil and greatly increasing drought and fire risk [19].

The vegetation and bodies of water integrated throughout sponge cities also addresses the heat island effect, lowers air temperatures, and improves air and water quality.

If left to thrive, vegetation captures carbon from the atmosphere aiding in climate change mitigation. Trees absorb carbon dioxide and transpire water vapor and microbes that seed cloud formation and maintain a healthy, balanced small water cycle bringing moderate rainfall rather than deluges. Trees also transpire chemicals that are beneficial to human health, immunity, mental health, and stress reduction. They also act as windbreaks and shelter for animals during storms.

Conclusion

Sponge cities are a crucial tool to address climate change and minimize the negative impacts of urban areas on the overall health of the planet and its inhabitants. Other nature-based solutions such as reforestation of native tree species, a return to agro-ecological methods for food production, and restoration of marine habitats are also key to our survival. None of these solutions will be profitable for corporations to implement, which is why there is a lack of widespread implementation of sponge cities outside of communist China. Only under a socialist planned economy, like that of China, can real solutions to climate change be implemented on a mass scale, as resources are directed to projects not according to the needs of profit, but to those of humanity and the planet.

Tina Landis is the author of the book Climate Solutions Beyond Capitalism, for which Liberation School has a study and discussion guide. Additionally, they host a 4-part video course Landis taught on the relationship between climate change, capitalism, and socialism.

References

[1] United Nations Population Fund,Annual Report 2008(New York: UNFP, 2009), 20. Availablehere; Megha Mukim and Mark Roberts (Eds.),Thriving: Making Cities Green, Resilient, and Inclusive in a Changing Climate(Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 2023), 75. Availablehere.
[2] Nicola Tollin, James Vener, Maria Pizzorni, et. al. (2022).Urban Climate Action: The Urban Content of the NCDs: Global Review 2022(Nairobi: United Nations Human Settlements Programme, 2022), 6. Availablehere.
[3] Friedrich Engels,The Condition of the Working Class in England(Oxford: Oxford University Press,1845/2009). Availablehere.
[4] Karl Marx,Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 1): A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1867/1967), 361.
[5] Tina Landis, “Atmospheric Rivers, Weather Whiplash and the Class Struggle,”Liberation News, 14 January 2023. Availablehere; Evan Branan and Tina Landis, “Heat Waves Bake the World: Workers Don’t Have to Bear the Brunt,”Liberation News, 13 July 2023. Availablehere.
[6] Ayesha Tandon, “Record-Breaking 2023 Heat Events Are ‘Not Rare Anymore’ Due to Climate Change,”Carbon Brief, 25 July 2023. Availablehere.
[7] Climate Matters, “Billion-Dollar Disasters in 2022,”Climate Central, 11 October 2022. Availablehere.
[8] Flood Defenders, “America’s Most Frequent and Expensive Disaster.” Availablehere.
[9] Sara Dennis, “Heat Island Effect,”Moody Engineering, 28 September 2022. Availablehere.
[10] Tamara Iungman, Marta Cirach, Federica Marando, et. al. “Cooling Cities Through Urban Green Infrastructure: A Health Impact Assessment of European Cities,”The Lancet401, no. 1076 (2023): 577-589.
[11] Tom Carroll, Sponge Cities: A Solarpunk Future by 2030,”Freethink, 28 April 2022. Availablehere.
[12] Tings Chak, Li Jianhua, and Lilian Zhang, “Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China,”Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, 23 July 2021. Availablehere.
[13] See, for example, Xu Tao, Yu Kongjian, Li Dihua, and Miao Wang, “Assessment and Impact Factor Analysis on Stormwater Regulation and Storage Capacity of Urban Green Space in China and Abroad,”China City Planning Review32, no. 1 (2023): 6-16; Kongian’s website ishere.
[14] Kongjian Yu,Letters to the Leaders of China: Kongjian Yu and the Future of the Chinese City(New York: Terreform, 2018).
[15] The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, “Document: Responding to Climate Change: China’s Policies and Actions,”China Daily, 28 October 2021. Availablehere.
[16] Ken Hammond, “China’s Environmental Problems: Beyond the Propaganda,”Liberation School, 08 December 2020. Availablehere.
[17] Tina Landis, “Colorado River Water Deal: A Bandaid or Real Progress?”Liberation News, 27 May 2023. Availablehere.
[18] Simon Romero and Serge F. Kovaleski, “How Invasive Plants Caused the Maui Fires to Rage,”The New York Times, 15 August 2023. Availablehere.
[19] Masanobu Fukuoka,Sowing Seeds in the Desert: Natural Farming, Global Restoration, and Ultimate Food Security(Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2012).

Sketching a Theory of Fossil Imperialism

By Bernardo Jurema and Elias Koenig

This is a summary of the paper ‘State Power and Capital in the Climate Crisis: A Theory of Fossil Imperialism,’ presented by the authors during the “Confronting Climate Coloniality” - Paper Session at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) annual meeting on March 26th, 2023. It is also an overview of some of the main ideas that we hope to further develop this year. While the research behind the conference paper was carried out at Research Institute for Sustainability - Helmholtz Centre Potsdam (RIFS), the opinions and viewpoints expressed herein are our own and do not represent the standpoints of RIFS as a whole. This piece was originally published on the RIFS Potsdam website.

In recent years, both activists and researchers have started to invoke the term fossil imperialism to highlight the ways in which imperialist politics are tied up with the logic of fossil capitalism. Under fossil capitalism, ceaseless accumulation of capital necessitates continued expansion of an energy base of coal, oil, and natural gas. Imperial states play a key role in the process, which has in turn enabled a remarkable concentration of imperial power and continues to do so in today’s world order. Understanding fossil imperialism, therefore, is necessary for devising effective strategies of resistance to a planet-wrecking capitalist status quo.

Our model of fossil imperialism attempts to sketch the general workings of this relationship between imperial states and fossil capital in its historical development over the past two centuries and in its different varieties. It is principally based on the two general modes of expansion and obstruction. On the one hand, the expansion and protection of new fossil fuel resources and infrastructure are crucial to keeping the engine rooms of fossil capital well-supplied. On the other hand, the obstruction or destruction of the infrastructure of rivaling capital factions and states in order to maintain control over pricing and distribution has been equally integral to the history of fossil imperialism. In this way, the workings of fossil imperialism reflect the more general nature of capitalism as a mode of production and destruction.

It is important to take into account the specific characteristics of the three dominant sources of fossil energy (coal, oil, gas) when analyzing concrete cases. While all three energy sources still hold a significant share of the global fossil economy, each also corresponds to a distinct historical phase in the development of fossil imperialism. Coal powered the rise of the British Empire, the switch to oil marked the ascent of American hegemony in the 20th century, and fossil gas is increasingly at the core of the United States’ attempt to continue projecting its supremacy well into the 21st century. While there is growing concern over new forms of "green imperialism", especially in relation to the extraction and distribution of the raw materials supposedly required to decarbonize the economies of the North, current fossil-fueled conflicts such as the Russian war in Ukraine or the Saudi war in Yemen show that the age of fossil imperialism is - unfortunately - far from over.

There are at least five ways in which imperial states facilitate the interests of fossil capital: through colonization, the projection of military power, the suppression of anti-extractivist movements, economic warfare, and the domination of global institutions. This scheme makes plain the crucial role of fossil fuels, functioning variously as a driver, as an enhancer or as an outcome of imperial states' actions. It disentangles the ways in which contemporary politics are significantly influenced by fossil fuels, which have played a defining role in shaping the structure of capitalist corporations, settler-imperial states, and earth-transforming technoscience. These arrangements have had profound consequences for ecological destruction and the implementation of ecological management strategies.

Colonization is a form of direct political domination and subjugation of one people by another. It was perhaps most evident during the “golden” age of coal, the fossil fuel that powered the rise of the British Empire — from Australia to India, from South Africa to Borneo. Because coal extraction requires a large amount of disciplined labor, arguably, it also necessitates more comprehensive forms of social and political control than oil and gas extraction. At the same time, the British — in many cases — obstructed the rapid expansion of foreign coal industries to protect their own domestic industry.  Even in the case of oil and gas, many of the major private companies like BP and Shell still operate in markets shaped by colonial legacies.

support our work by making a donation today!

“Projection of military power” refers to different kinds of military interventions short of full-on colonization. Historically, states often deployed their own forces to protect fossil infrastructure abroad — a practice that continues today in various ways. Projection of military power also takes place through proxy armies, funded through a closed circuit of oil money and weapons contracts, as in the case of the Gulf monarchies. The 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq reminds us how current the role of military power remains. Twenty years after the regime-change military intervention, the United States still has 2500 troops stationed in the country. And, as has recently been revealed, BP and Shell, which had been barred from the country for decades, have extracted tens of billions of dollars in Iraqi oil post-invasion.

The pursuit of regional economic dominance on the part of fossil imperial states requires the suppression of anti-extractivist movements and other grassroots movements opposed to the social order. Interventionary military assistance was justified from the 1990s onwards on the basis of immigration enforcement, anti-narcotics control, and fighting against general criminality. For example, the role of the War on Drugs in continuing counterinsurgent practices against civilian population that were carried out until the late 1980s within a Cold War framework. However, according to Russell Crandall, professor at Davidson College in North Carolina and former Pentagon and National Security Council official under George W. Bush, the significant role in shaping outcomes is not primarily played by the U.S. military advisors, but rather by the "imperial diplomats" – the civilian officials within the U.S. foreign policy structure.

In his study of economic sanctions, Cornell historian Nicholas Mulder has demonstrated that modern-day sanctions developed out of mechanisms for energy control, blacklisting, import and export rationing, property seizures and asset freezes, trade prohibitions, and preclusive purchasing, as well as financial blockade — simply put, economic warfare. He shows that effectively isolating a whole nation from the intricate networks that support global trade requires the ability to gather information and generate knowledge. This involves mapping the intricate web of physical goods and resources that connect the specific country to the rest of the globe. Key factors in this process include having legal authority and access to more precise data and statistics. What makes it possible to impose this unilateral sanctions regime on the rest of the world is the domination of the global (financial and political) institutions that regulate the trade and distribution of fossil fuels. Both 19th-century British and 20th-century US-American dominance stemmed from their respective global leadership in corporate, regulatory, technological, and financial frameworks, which in turn was tightly linked to the pound sterling and later the US dollar being the chief reserve and trade currencies of their time.

In the age of American hegemony, the United Nations and other multilateral organizations — in particular, the Bretton Woods system (the International Monetary Fund and World Bank) — have become key means to maintain its armed primacy and fossil-based economic dominance. Significantly, the US-led bloc thwarted attempts by the newly decolonized countries in the postwar period to build a fairer world order by torpedoing the Third World agenda, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the Non-Aligned Movement and the New International Economic Order.

Conclusion

It is impossible to understand imperialism without understanding the role of fossil fuels in its historical emergence and development. A climate movement that does not actively take into account the mechanisms of fossil imperialism risks being co-opted into imperialist false solutions to the climate crisis. Likewise, anti-imperial movements that fail to break definitively with the logic of fossil capitalism historically fall victim to various social and ecological contradictions. A case in point are the Pink Tide governments of the first decade of the 21st century. As University of Toronto political scientist Donald Kingsbury put it, when "faced with a choice between extraction and the local movements that made their governments possible,” these regimes “sided with extraction." A better understanding of the topic can therefore contribute to more effective climate justice activism, more strategic clarity and tactical innovation, and serve as a basis for more international solidarity.

Climate Change and the Pursuit of Growth

By Kidus Desta

Since beginning his first term in January 2021, liberals have routinely heralded Joe Biden as America’s first climate president. Yet Biden’s policy record shows that he is thoroughly undeserving of that title. Take, for example, the president’s recent approval of the Willow Project.

Centered in the remote tundra on Alaska’s northern coast, the new drilling venture’s scope is appalling. It includes 200 oil wells connected by multiple pipelines. Experts estimate that the Willow Project will, by itself, generate total emissions equivalent to the entire country of Belgium within 30 years. And Belgium — for the record — is far from green, ranking within the bottom septile of the Sustainable Development Index.

More recently, Biden decided to auction off over “73 million acres of waters in the Gulf of Mexico” for oil and gas drilling. For comparison, the country of Italy is about 74 million acres. Estimates state that this would lead to emissions of about “21.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.” That is more than the entire nation of Bolivia.

Biden approved the auction in partial fulfillment of a deal party leadership made with Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV). To secure Manchin’s vote for the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats inserted “requirements for new oil and gas leases” into the bill. They also added a stipulation preventing Interior Secretary Deb Haaland from “issuing a lease for offshore wind” until the oil and gas sale goes through.

The administration has failed to deliver on campaign promises of tackling climate change as it continues leading initiatives that will worsen this global emergency. And their concessions to conservatives like Manchin were unnecessary. Rather than forming a deal with the opposition on the uncompromisable issue of climate change, the Democrats could have instead pressured more conservative Democrats through acts such as removing them from committees. Instead, Manchin continues to serve as Chair of the Senate Energy Committee without any repercussions. The Democratic Party continues to immediately concede on many issues rather than applying pressure to the opposition which results in nothing positive ever getting done.

The Biden administration’s actions with respect to the climate have thus been extremely reckless in the midst of an unprecedented ecological crisis. On March 21st, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released yet another stark warning about just how bad things have gotten. Their report found that we are on track to surpass the dreaded 1.5-degree tipping point by the early 2030s. With this, we can expect “climate disasters… so extreme that people will not be able to adapt.”

“Basic components of the Earth system will be fundamentally, irrevocably altered,” the Panel’s scientists continued. “Heat waves, famines and infectious diseases could claim millions of additional lives by the century’s end.”

Despite this, Biden seems committed to accelerating humanity’s race toward the precipice of climate doom. In that crucial respect, the Democratic president bears stunning resemblance to his Republican opponents. When it comes to climate change, perhaps Democrats and Republicans are not so different after all.

The rhetorical strategies of each party tend to obscure this reality. Whereas Democrats often gesture toward ecological justice, Republicans just deny climate change — and, therefore, the need to address it — altogether. But, ultimately, both parties are united in their commitment to worsen — or, at the very least, not improve — the situation.

This is obviously bad news, since preventing total environmental destruction will take an extraordinary policy response. New research in The Lancet states that ensuring a climate-safe future and decent living standards for all would require massive reductions in global inequality. Crucially, the global Gini coefficient might need to fall below those of even the most egalitarian European nations.

This becomes a problem when accounting for the innate characteristics of capitalism. Because the economic system inherently prioritizes capital and profit over human needs. Anthropologist Jason Hickel writes eloquently on this topic in his book Less is More.

He describes the “self-reinforcing cycle” that turns profit into capital in pursuit of endless growth. To recoup their investments, corporations must continue to grow. This leads them to “scour the globe” for any sign of potential growth. 

Without growth, businesses will fail as they lose their investments and are consequently outcompeted by other firms. Even companies in a dominant market position cannot afford to just maintain. As Hickel explains, capital that sits “loses value” due to factors such as inflation and depreciation. These “pressures of growth” are so strong that corporations will disregard long-run environmental consequences, even if they’ll prove personally injurious. Capitalism demands that endless growth and accumulation be the top priorities.

But how does this drive lead to environmental devastation? To grow and enrich themselves, corporations must produce. This often requires the “extraction of fossil fuel,” the “razing of forests and draining of wetlands,” and so on.

These acts contribute to the destruction of the environment through climate change, soil depletion, and the creation of ocean dead zones lacking the oxygen to support biodiversity. The United Nations even estimates that the extraction capital demands is “responsible for 80% of total biodiversity loss.” While this may seem counterintuitive due to billionaires living on the same planet, the drive towards growth is a logical outcome within a capitalist framework. 

Given the moment’s growing urgency, we must recognize the failures of our current systems. It has exacerbated the climate issues we face. In the United States, it is clear that both the Democratic and Republican parties have prioritized capital over the well-being of the planet and the people who inhabit it. Global capitalism also does the same. To provide a better world for future generations, radical and systemic changes are needed to create a system that holds humanity and our planet as the priority.  

Kidus Desta is a Hampton Institute intern and undergraduate studying political science and economics at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Biden/Harris: Climate Hypocrites

By Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso

Republished in modified form from The Michigan Specter.

On Thursday, January 12th, Vice President Kamala Harris visited the University of Michigan’s Rackham Auditorium for a conversation on her administration’s “commitment to tackle our climate crisis.” The event specifics were largely concealed in the runup, with the university not confirming the exact time and location until the day before. Local news even hesitated to cover the proceedings until after their conclusion.

When coverage did break, however, its tune was unmistakably celebratory. The Michigan Daily, for example, highlighted the vice president’s nods to intersectionality while discussing environmental justice. This point and others apparently resonated, as MLive reported that the audience “embraced… Harris’[s] call for urgent climate action.”

But that call rings utterly hollow upon closer examination. When it comes to environmental issues, the Biden-Harris administration’s hypocrisy seemingly knows no bounds. They claim to care about climate change, yet fund and diplomatically support Israel — an apartheid regime infamous for, among other things, gross acts of environmental devastation.

Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE) — the University of Michigan’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter — highlighted this contradiction. The group organized a large demonstration outside of Rackham during Harris’s event. Speeches and chants recounted Israel’s horrid environmental record.

The country has a monstrous ecological footprint, making it one of the most unsustainable places on Earth. Israel’s nominally high levels of development — which are themselves built on colonialism — appear rather unimpressive when adjusted for ecological overshoot. It ranks well within the bottom quintile of the Sustainable Development Index. Even the United Kingdom looks green by comparison.

These statistics, though jarring, still do not fully capture the extent of Israel’s environmental destruction. Israeli authorities have “uprooted hundreds of thousands of trees to date, including olive, citrus, date, and banana.” They also regularly pollute Palestinian resources. This takes multiple forms. Not only does Israel knowingly use pesticides that contaminate the soil and harm various bird species, but the country is also notorious for poisoning freshwater reserves. Israeli settlements in particular are prominent sites of toxic dumping. As if that wasn’t enough, Israel consistently denies Palestinians access to sources of renewable energy, preventing the people they colonize from developing more sustainably.

Despite these undeniable facts, Israel goes to great lengths to cultivate an environmentalist image for itself. Against all available evidence, Israeli state officials frequently tout the country’s commitment to green ideals. This “greenwashing” is nothing more than a shoddy attempt to obscure Israeli crimes.

During their demonstration, SAFE called attention to this brutal reality. Above all, the group’s direct action made one thing crystal clear: true environmental consciousness necessitates absolute opposition to Israeli apartheid. Any project that aims to green the world while presupposing the validity of Zionism is not only incoherent but doomed. Until political leaders like Kamala Harris take heed, the discountenanced masses will continue to air their grievances and foment unrest.

Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso is a Colombian organizer, writer, editor, and undergraduate studying music and history. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of The Michigan Specter, the University of Michigan’s premier socialist publication.

Five Points About the Climate Crisis

[Pictured: Deforesting in Tasmania, Australia. Photo by Matt Palmer]

By Jerome Small

Republished from Red Flag.

This article is based on a speech given by Jerome Small, Victorian Socialists Northern Metro candidate in the upcoming state election, at the 30 July United Climate Rally in Melbourne.

Point number one is acknowledging whose land we’re on: the First Nations people, the Wurundjeri people and the entire Kulin nations, and the Aboriginal people around this state and around this country.  More than 200 years ago, these First People had a social system imposed on them that turned land into a commodity, that turned human beings into a commodity, that turned everything in the world into a commodity to be bought and sold for a profit.

That social system decided very quickly that it was more profitable to run sheep on this part of the world than to let human beings live on it as they had always done. And the genocide ensued. That social system continues to decide that it’s more profitable to rip coal and gas from the ground than to let Aboriginal people live on their country. That dispossession continues to this day.

So it should be both an inspiration and an education for all of us that, despite everything that that social system has visited on First Nations people, they are still here and still fighting for justice. That should be a reminder to all of us that sometimes the very survival of people depends on resistance, depends on fighting, depends on organising.

That social system is still with us, of course, and still turning the planet and everything on it into a commodity, regardless of the consequences. Which gets to my second point—that capitalism has brought us to a dire situation.

We’ve heard about wildfires in countries, like the UK and Poland, that are not accustomed to seeing wildfires, due to the massive heatwave in Europe. We know a bit about this from the Australian bushfire summer of 2019-20. It’s not hard to find accounts of firefighters attempting to fight flames 70 metres tall. Next time you’re in the city, find a fifteen-storey building. That’s 70 metres, give or take. It’s terrifying. We’re talking about flames that high—in some cases twice as high, up to 150 metres.

That’s not the scariest thing, though. The scariest thing isn’t the 33 people who died from the flames that summer, or the 400 people who died from the smoke, or the 1 billion animals that died from the fire and the smoke and the after-effects. The scariest thing isn’t that 7 percent of New South Wales, an area bigger than several European countries, burned in that year.

The scariest thing is that, according to the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO, that year of 2019—the hottest year ever recorded in Australia—will be the average temperature of a year in Australia once we get 1.5 degrees of global warming. All those flames, all that death, all that ash—they’re saying will be our average temperature.

And Labor is looking at 1.5 degrees out its rear vision mirror as it zooms past, on its planet-incinerating 43 percent target. This gets to my third point: Labor and fossil fuels.

It’s hard to picture the scale of the fossil fuel export projects that Labor is prepared to approve.

I went to the Latrobe Valley last week. As you enter the town of Morwell, you can see on your right-hand side a massive pit 100 metres deep and the size of the Melbourne CBD, all the way from Docklands through to the MCG. It was an open-cut coal mine that for 60 years fed Australia’s highest emitting power station, Hazelwood. The best estimate I’ve seen is that all of the coal fed into that power station produced 400 million tonnes of CO2. A huge contribution to global heating.

But the Scarborough gas project in Western Australia, which Labor is prepared to sign off on, will release 1.4 billion tonnes of CO2— three and a half times the amount that came from that enormous pit next to Morwell in the Latrobe Valley. Then there’s the Beetaloo project, which is a similar size—and that’s just the first of the massive gas fracking projects that Labor is prepared to endorse in the Northern Territory. Add Narrabri in NSW. Add Beach Energy down in the Otway Basin in Victoria. Thank you, Daniel Andrews, for your contribution to runaway heating.

That tells us everything we need to know about where we’re headed under Labor. They have no intention of interfering with a social system that turns everything into a commodity to be bought and sold for profit, regardless of consequences.

This gets me to the fourth point—what have we got going for us, in the face of all this? In my opinion, quite a bit.

We’ve got the huge majority of humanity who do not make billion-dollar profits from cooking the planet.

We’ve got many people in the Latrobe Valley. There’s a stereotype that the coal regions are wall to wall coal-loving blue-collar workers. That’s bullshit, and it’s an insult to say it. You go to the Latrobe Valley and, just like any other part of the country or the world, there’s a significant argument taking place. There are people in that community—and in those power stations, in fact—making arguments about the need to get out of fossil fuels as soon as possible. That’s something that we have going for us.

We’ve got the potential for mass movements like what the climate strikers showed us in 2019 around the world: some of the biggest protests that have happened in this town for a hell of a long time. We’ve got that going for us.

We’ve got civil disobedience going for us. Whether it’s Extinction Rebellion, whether it’s Blockade IMARC, whether it’s Blockade Australia, we’re going to need a shit ton more of that.

We’ve got the truth going for us—but the truth is never going to be enough. We need organisation to turn all of that into a mass movement.

One thing that we also need, if our movement is going to succeed, is radical politics. That is my final point. That’s something that a lot of people here from different perspectives share. And that’s something that the Victorian Socialists are very much building in the few months ahead in the election campaign.

Yes, we’ll be talking about reversing privatisations. Yes, we’ll be talking about zero-emissions electricity grids by 2030 and a zero-carbon economy by 2035—because I think that’s the only thing that we can be talking about if we’re serious about stopping the temperature rising far past 2019.

We’ll also be talking about a vision of a society that is not a social system that turns everything into a commodity to be bought and sold for a profit, even as the bodies pile high.

We’ll be talking about a vision of a society founded on solidarity and cooperation, which comes out of the struggles of today, and which doesn’t rely on billion-dollar corporations running our energy system and running the world. A society that says to those corporations: Do not pass go, do not collect $11.7 billion from the federal government this year. Your time is up. You’re done. Get out of the way.

You can take your 43 percent greenwashing target, you can take your coal and gas, and you can go to hell with them because we’re taking our world back. We’ll be talking about ordinary people making history over the next few months. And organising to do just that.

Imperialism is the Arsonist: Marxism's Contribution to Ecological Literatures and Struggles

By Derek Wall

Republished from Abstrakt.

Marxism’s contributions to ecological literature and struggles is a rich and contradictory field of discussion. Marxism in diverse ways has fed into environmental struggles and broader ecological politics. Broadly, I would argue that there has been a deepening appreciation of the ecological themes in the work of Marx and Engels in recent decades. Most significantly, and recently, there has been a shift towards debates around Eco-Leninism, with several different attempts to read the climate crisis through the insights of Lenin. However, specifically Green Party politics, in some states, has seen a movement of former Marxist-Leninists towards a revisionist understanding of politics, with revolutionary objectives being discarded. The way that Marxism’s contribution to ecological literatures and struggles has played out is also internationally diverse, my understanding is strongest when it comes to West European examples but the growth of militant environmental movements across the globe must be acknowledged.

One starting point is the example of the German Green Party. I heard an interesting story; I cannot comment as to whether it is true! An intern worked for a prominent elected German Green Party politician, I forget whether the politician sat in the Bundestag, the European Parliament or a Lander (regional parliament). The intern had been asked to go to the politician’s home while he was away on political business. Watering the plants, the intern was surprised to find a huge, in fact life size, poster of the Great Helmsman himself Chairman Mao, on the wall.

This anecdote has a serious side and illustrates a number of ways in which Marxism has informed ecological literatures and struggles. Most empirically and least significantly the German Greens can be seen as partly a product of anti-revisionist politics. It is also interesting to note how ecological movements and struggles have acted as a movement from Red to Green, a movement from Marxist-Leninist commitment to centre-ground revisionist reform politics. It also reminds us to examine in an open way a range of key Marxists, including Mao, Lenin, Marx, Engels, Trotsky, and Luxemburg in terms of their attitudes to nature.

Marx’s Ecology

A variety of academics and green political writers argued bluntly that Marxism had little to contribute to ecological struggles. Marx and Engels were defined as Prometheans concerned to use nature as an instrument to promote human progress. Communism was based in Marx’s work on rapid industrialisation with little thought for the consequences for the environment. Thus green or ecological political ideology provided a break from existing ideologies. Jonathon Porritt, a leading member of the British Ecology Party made such claims in Seeing Green in the early 1980s, arguing bluntly that communism and capitalism were two facets of a wider anti-ecological ideology, 

“dedicated to industrial growth, to the expansion of the means of production, to a materialist ethic as the best means of meeting people’s needs, and to unimpeded technological development. Both rely on increasing centralization and large-scale bureaucratic control and co-ordination. From a viewpoint of narrow scientific rationalism, both insist that the planet is there to be conquered, that big is self-evidently beautiful, and that what cannot be measured is of no importance.” (Porritt, 1984: 44)

In turn the environmental record of socialist countries such the USSR was seen as both environmentally destructive and entirely consistent with such a Marxist anti-ecology based on the foundation of classic texts by Marx and Engels (Cole, 1993). 

An alternative approach from the editors the academic journal Capitalism Nature Socialism (CNS) was to emphasise that Marx’s work is vital to ecological politics. This was based on an understanding that capitalism drives environmental destruction and thus green political economy inevitably demanded an articulation with anti-capitalism, if it was to provide a realistic chance of overcoming ecological problems. James O’ Connor developed this approach with his description of the ecological contradictions of capitalism, arguing that capitalism tended to degrade its possibility of existence by destroying nature. Without nature, capitalism could not survive, but the continued drive for accumulation, exploitation and profit tended to destroy nature (O’Connor, 1988). In turn, Joel Kovel, also associated with CNS, argued that economic growth tended to degrade the environment and that economic growth is functional to capitalism. In his book title The Enemy of Nature, he found the answer in capitalism. Kovel noted the distinction between ‘use values’ and ‘exchange values’, discussed by Marx in the first chapter of the first volume of Capital, was essential to creating an ecologically sustainable society. Thus by making goods to last longer and providing communal products for use, human prosperity could grow without the waste of capitalism. However, like Porritt and other green critics of Marx, Kovel argued that while Marx provided a necessary analysis to capitalism, Marxism was resistant to ecological themes, 

Forged at the moment of industrialization, its [i.e. socialism’s] transformative impulse tended to remain within the terms of the industrialized domination of nature. Thus it continued to manifest the technological optimism of the industrial world-view, and its associated logic of productivism — all of which feed into the mania for growth. The belief in unlimited technical progress has been beaten back in certain quarters by a host of disasters, from nuclear waste to resistant bacteria, but these setbacks barely touch the core of socialist optimism, that its historical mission is to perfect the industrial system and not overcome it. The productivist logic is grounded in a view of nature that regards the natural world […] from the standpoint of its utility as a force of production. It is at that point that socialism all-too-often shares with capitalism a reduction of nature to resources — and, consequently, a sluggishness in recognizing ourselves in nature and nature in ourselves. (Kovel, 2007: 229)

Such perspectives from Kovel and O’Connor might be linked politically to the birth of popularisation of the term ecosocialism. Existing socialism and communism were anti-ecological, key texts might advocate a disregard for nature, so while socialism and/or communism were essential to ecological struggles, they need a prefix ‘eco’ to be distinguished from existing anti-ecological left alternatives.

I would argue that we have seen a sharp break from such perspectives, since the publication of US sociologist John Bellamy Foster’s book Marx’s Ecology. Foster argues, convincingly to my mind, that ecology is core to Marx and Engels’ project (Foster, 2000). Indeed an examination of Marx and Engels’ texts suggests an overwhelming concern with environmental issues. In turn their philosophy based on relationships derived from Hegel and perhaps Spinoza, is akin to ecology defined as a science of relationships. For example, in Capital vol 3 Marx notes,

“Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good heads of the household].” (Marx, 1959 [1894]: 530)

Discussion of such seemingly contemporary themes of deforestation, pollution and food additives can be found in Capital.

Engels also focussed on ecological questions,

“Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us. Each of them, it is true, has in the first place the consequences on which we counted, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor, and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that they were laying the basis for the present devastated condition of these countries, by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture. […] Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature – but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other beings of being able to know and correctly apply its laws.” (Engels, 1972)

Marx and Engels’ sustained meditations on the sciences including biology, brought them to consider environmental issues. The exploitation of labour was to them also allied to environmental threats to health and safety. Engels’s Condition of the English Working Class looked at how a poor work place environment contributed to the degradation of workers.

John Bellamy Foster argues that ecological considerations were central to Marx’s construction of historical materialism. In turn, Marx’s notion of a metabolic rift between humanity and the rest of nature, has been used by Foster to conceptualise ecological crisis. Healing the rift is the answer to problems such as climate change, to the extent that humans master nature, we are mastering an element of ourselves rather than something alien. Thus while Marxists and other socialists might self-criticise their approach to ecological questions, the description of Marx and Engels as anti-environmental thinkers has been exposed as a myth. How, though, have Marxists engaged with green movements, and to what extent have Marx and Engels’ ecological assumptions informed practical struggles? Certainly since the 1970s Marxists have sometimes joined Green or Ecological political parties.

German Greens roots in Maoism

Specifically ecological political parties emerged in the 1970s. Broadly this was a result of the globalisation of environmental problems, reflected in scientific reports such as MIT’s Limits to Growth. The first Ecology Parties were found in the UK and New Zealand/ Aotearoa (Parkin, 1989). These to some extent were conservative institutions without a critique of capitalism or human exploitation. However, the emergence of broader and more radical social movements can be seen as leading a transformation from purely environmental parties to Green Parties. The anti-nuclear power and anti-nuclear weapons movements during the 1970s and 1980s helped create green political parties, the most significant being the German Green Party. The German Greens originated partly from the activism of anti-revisionists to seek a new source of intervention (Hülsberg, 1988: 51-53).

I am not sure if there was a distinct reason for anti-revisionists to get involved with the German Greens. It seems more that this was part of a general engagement of the German left. The story of the German Greens has been told many times: briefly, those on the left, involved in social movements, joined a platform to fight elections. Those who had been involved in the student movement, and some sympathetic to the Baader-Meinhof gang, joined environmentalists. At first the Greens were, in the words of an early leader figure Petra Kelly, ‘the anti-party party’ (Emerson, 2011: 55). Given the openness of the German electoral system, co-option was perhaps close to inevitable. Greens were elected on radical platforms but eventually joined coalition regional governments with the SPD, and the party over the decades has moved broadly to the centre right.

A number of prominent German Green politicians, for example, Ralf Fücks, a former mayor of Bremen; and Winfried Kretschmann, Minister-President Baden-Württemberg were originally active in Kommunistischer Bund West Deutschland. Perhaps the largest Maoist political party in what was at the time West Germany it took a decision to join the Greens en masse in 1982. Other anti-revisionists joined the Greens along with those closer to autonomist networks such as Joschka Fischer and Daniel Cohn-Bendit (Kühn, 2005).

The relationship of green parties and ecological movements to Marxism has demonstrated contradictory tendencies. One has been a move from a more conservative environmentalism to great radicalism and commitment. For example, the British Ecology Party was founded by members of the right wing Conservative Party, however while Marxism has never been strong in the organisation’s history, it has broadly moved to the left (Wall, 1994). Typically in one recent leadership contest hustings, all the candidates insisted that they opposed capitalism (Jarvis, 2021). On the other hand, in the words of the East German eco-Marxist Rudolf Bahro, there has been a shift From Red to Green (Bahro, 1984). The German Greens are perhaps the best known example, as briefly discussed, but there are many others. For example, the Green Left in Holland are now a standard European Green Party, like the Germans, in the political centre, but they were created originally out of the dissolution of four Dutch left wing political parties including the Communist Party (Voerman, 2006: 80). This trend isn’t of course restricted to Greens, one thinks of the movement of the Dutch Socialist Party from Marxism to fairly standard social democracy. And as we know from Lenin, most socialist parties of Europe at the start of the first world war including the SPD ditched communism and supported their contending nation states. Certainly the German members of anti-revisionist organisations who joined the Greens have generally moved dramatically from Mao and Hoxha to accommodation with the Christian Democrats.

At times these contradictory movements are reflected in the work of a single individual. André Gorz, the French ecological theorist, acted paradoxically to promote a movement from red to green, and conversely from environmentalism to anti-capitalist commitment. Best known for his book Farewell to the Working Class, the former Marxist argued that class conflict was largely redundant and new social movements, including environmentalists, represented a force for potential change (Gorz, 1987). Thus he can be seen as giving textual support to the movement from anti-revisionism into social movements, into Green Parties and within the Greens moving apparently ever to the political right. Conversely his text Ecology as Politics, identified the economic drive to accumulate as the key source of ecological risk. Prefiguring Joel Kovel’s arguments by two decades, he argued that capitalism is the cause of environmental destruction. ‘’This is the nature of consumption in affluent societies; it ensures the growth of capital without increasing either the general level of satisfaction or the number of genuinely useful goods (‘use values’) which people have at any given point in time.’ (Gorz, 1980: 23) Gorz thus, amongst other authors, helped promote an anti-capitalist critique amongst some greens, which pointed back to Marx’s broad analysis of capitalism in Capital vol one.

Green Trotskyism?

One approach has been to argue that while Marx was green, the failure of much 20th century socialism to promote environmentalism could be placed at the door of Stalin and Stalinism. This seems to my mind a superficial approach, blaming an individual rather than engaging in sustained analysis. Equally it is difficult to find an environmental core in the work of Trotsky, who might be seen as Stalin’s main critic. Trotsky typically argued that communism was a project of perhaps rather brutally and crudely mastering nature.

“Through the machine, man in Socialist society will command nature in its entirety, with its grouse and its sturgeons. He will point out places for mountains and for passes. He will change the course of the rivers, and he will lay down rules for the oceans. The idealist simpletons may say that this will be a bore, but that is why they are simpletons. Of course this does not mean that the entire globe will be marked off into boxes, that the forests will be turned into parks and gardens. Most likely, thickets and forests and grouse and tigers will remain, but only where man commands them to remain.” (Trotsky, 1941: 5)

Having said this Trotsky did argue that ‘man will do it so well that the tiger won’t even notice the machine, or feel the change, but will live as he lived in primeval times. The machine is not in opposition to the earth. In turn there have been some manifestations of environmentally aware Trotskyism. The present Fourth International, from Ernest Mandel’s line, is explicitly ecosocialist in nature. Its various national sections are highly engaged in ecological work. In Britain, Alan Thornett of Socialist Resistance, which is associated with this Fourth International, produced a detailed account of an ecosocialist approach to climate change (Thornett, 2019). Polemics from others in the Fourth International have explicitly criticised Trotsky for failing to address ecological issues, unlike Marx and Engels (Tanuro, 2015)

The existence of numerous Trotskyist internationals can be confusing, although of course this is a feature of other forms of Marxism. It is possible that the Mandelite Fourth International was influenced by Pabloite strands of thought. The Greek Trotskyist Michel Pablo split the Fourth International in the 1960s but his comrades re-joined in the 1990s (Coates, nd). During the 1970s they were strong advocates of what might be seen as an ecosocialist approach. Strongest perhaps in Australia, a leading Pabloite, the physicist Alan Roberts, published The Self-Managing Environment in 1979 (Roberts, 1979). Drawing on both Marx and Freud it criticised the kind of consumer capitalism theorised by Marcuse and other Western Marxists. Roberts’ argument was that a lack of democratic involvement including an absence of workers’ control, led to a frustrated demand for consumer goods. The less we participate and have the ability to shape our life experience, the more we compensate by consuming wasteful goods. The ecological crisis is seen as a product of capitalist growth, growth in consumer capitalism is environmentally destructive. A self-managed socialist society is thus an ecosocialist alternative. Roberts also produced a strong critique of neo-Malthusian environmentalists who blamed ecological problems on over population rather than capitalism. Other chapters in The Self-Managing Environment covered the so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’ arguing that rather than acting as a metaphor for environmental destruction as suggested by the right wing biologist Garrett Hardin, commons had been seized by force and enclosed.

Nick Origlass, a leading Pabloite, engaged in local government ecosocialism, creating his own independent Labour Party in Leichhardt Municipal Council in Sydney to win local power and challenge toxic waste dumping in his community (Greenland, 1988). Australia also saw the creation of the green ban movement, where trade unionists in the Building Workers Union refused to work on construction projects that damaged the environment (Koffman, 2021).

Another Trotskyist figure passionately involved with ecosocialist politics is the Peruvian revolutionary Hugo Blanco. While Blanco retains fraternal links with the Fourth International, his present politics is closer to that of the Mexican Zapatistas. He publishes the newspaper Lucha Indigena and is also an active support of the Rojava Revolution. Originally an agronomy student, he studied in Argentina, he led a peasant uprising in the early 1960s which successfully gained land reform. During his many decades of activism he has become increasingly engaged in ecological and indigenous struggles (Wall, 2018). As I write, he is in his 80s but remains a leading ecosocialist thinker and activist.

Green Cuba

While Socialist states have been criticised on their ecological policies during the 20th century, Cuba has proved a sharp exception. Since the early 1990s, Cuba has pursued policies to drastically reduced climate change emissions and to protect the environment in a variety of ways. The reason for Cuba’s overt and strong turn towards environmental protection is twofold. The collapse of the Soviet Union meant that Cuba was no longer supplied with cheap oil after 1990. This led to a severe crisis, in the context of a continuing US blockade, resulting in what has been termed the ‘Special Period’. Thus a sharp reduction in the consumption of oil was vital so as to ensure the survival of Cuban society (Plonska and Saramifar, 2019). In turn, and apparently irrespective of this necessity, Fidel Castro became deeply engaged in ecological concerns and debates. At the 1992 UN Rio conference on the international environment he made the case for green policies, noting:

“An important biological species – humankind – is at risk of disappearing due to the rapid and progressive elimination of its natural habitat. We are becoming aware of this problem when it is almost too late to prevent it. It must be said that consumer societies are chiefly responsible for this appalling environmental destruction. 

With only 20 percent of the world’s population, they consume two thirds of all metals and three fourths of the energy produced worldwide. They have poisoned the seas and the rivers. They have polluted the air. They have weakened and perforated the ozone layer. They have saturated the atmosphere with gases, altering climatic conditions with the catastrophic effects we are already beginning to suffer.” (Castro, 2016)

Cuba has been so successful at introducing environmentally friendly policies that it has regularly been cited as the world’s best example of sustainable development. Agriculture has been partially decarbonised, with a push to grow using organic farming. There has been significant investment in renewable energy including wind turbines. Buses have been promoted as a means of reducing dependence on oil to power cars. In 2019, Cuba topped the Sustainable development index promoting economic activity that was ecologically sustainable (Trinder, 2020).

Indeed the supposedly anti-ecological record of the Soviet Union and other socialist states has recently been challenged in a detailed comparative study (Engel-Di Mauro 2021). While Cuba’s environmental policies are increasingly well know, it is perhaps often forgotten that the Soviet Union in its earliest years was also lauded as an environmental model. Under Lenin, National parks were opened and animal conservation was promoted (Stahnke, 2021). In recent years the notion of eco Leninism has become noted by diverse writers. Andreas Malm the Swedish academic has argued that to overcome the climate crisis we need to return to Lenin. He has argued that the urgency of the climate crisis might mean embracing an approach similar to the war communism of the early years of the Soviet Union (Malm, 2020). 

Marxism as a guide to ecological alternatives

So how do we draw this all together, moving from cataloguing various manifestations of ecological Marxism to constructing a political alternative? I have briefly sketched some articulations of Marxism and ecological movements/literatures but this is a vast field and I have left much out. There are four themes I would like, in conclusion, to at least note 1) The commons 2) Working class productivity 3) Anti-imperialism, and finally 4) the role of Leninism in promoting transition. 

The commons, a notion of collective ownership, most extensively explored in recent years by the Nobel Prize winning political economist Elinor Ostrom is essential to tackling ecological problems (Ostrom 2019). It is also a recurring concept in the work of Marx and Engels. Capitalism is a driver of ecological destruction, the notion of collective ownership of resources in contrast creates the possibility of shared prosperity and sustainability. Marx’s observation that we are not the owners of the Earth and should leave it in a better state for future generations, noted above, is a useful starting point for a green political economy. The Marxist aspiration for a society based upon the ensemble, the collective and creative interaction of all of us, for example, promoted by the British musician and revolutionary Cornelius Cardew is pertinent (Norman, 2019). 

Climate change and other severe environmental problems demand working class solutions. The productivity and creativity of workers is vital to ecological alternatives. The often forgotten history of working class environmental politics demands study. I noted above the example of the Australian Green Ban movement in halting environmentally damaging building projects. Workers produce and can produce alternative sustainable futures, the concept of workers’ plans for ecological production is important (Hampton, 2015). 

Anti-imperialism is another important dimension. Thomas Sankara (2018) reminds us that imperialism is the arsonist that burns the forests .There are numerous movements that link anti-imperialism with ecological politics, stretching from indigenous social movements in Latin America to the Rojava Revolution. Another useful contribution from Andreas Malm is his insight into how fossil fuels were the historical product of colonial exploitation and capitalist accumulation (Malm, 2016). The Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui argued that land was at the heart of struggles for autonomy in the face of colonial domination (1971). This is a theme taken up by Max Ajl who argues ‘Eco-socialists have to start from the basic demands of colonised peoples: namely national liberation. The Palestinian liberation struggle is one of the few, but not the only, remaining ‘classical’ national liberation struggles, which aims to break foreign settler control over the land.’ (Hancock, 2021).

In a wide ranging survey of ecology and Leninism, Lenin’s significance to ecological movement can be seen as ranging from an analysis of imperialism to an embrace of base building and dual power strategies (Woody, 2020). Lenin’s strategic analysis might be of value in theorising how to build political organisations that can overcome the ecological crisis (Wall, 2020). Leninism is, out of a number of important Marxist contributions to ecological debates, to my mind potentially the most important. Lenin’s contribution was to investigate how in a specific context we make revolution. There is a growing awareness that capitalism is the key driver of climate change and other ecological ills. Transforming society and transcending capitalism can be seen as essential to human survival, the critical investigation of how we do so can be advanced by an open reading of Lenin’s words and work. Lenin helped make history in a very different world to ours, so his insights cannot be crudely cut and pasted on to contemporary reality but re-reading his texts is vital. The French philosopher Alain Badiou notes that, ‘We must conceive of Marxism as the accumulated wisdom of popular revolutions, the reason they engender, and the fixation and precision of their target’ (Bostells, 2011: 280). We need precision in tackling an accelerating and many sided ecological crisis, Marxism, read with care and acted upon materially, will guide us.

Derek Wall teaches political economy at Goldsmiths, University of London, is a former international coordinator of the Green Party of England and Wales, and is active in the Marxist Centre.

Sources

Bahro, Rudolf (1984) From Red to Green: Interviews with New Left Review. London: Verso.

Bostells, Bruno (2011) Badiou and Politics. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.

Castro, F. (2016) “Fight the ecological destruction threatening the planet!” Climate and Capitalism, accessed: October 9, 2021.

Coates, Andrew (nd) “The British Pabloites“, accessed: October 9, 2021.

Cole, Daniel H., (1993).  “Marxism and the Failure of Environmental Protection in Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R.” Indiana University Maurer School of Law 

Emerson, Peter (2011) Defining Democracy Voting Procedures in Decision-Making, Elections and Governance. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg

Engel-Di Mauro, Salvatore (2021) Socialist States and the Environment: Lessons for Eco–Socialist Futures. London: Pluto Press. 

Engels, Frederick, (1972 [1883]) Dialectics of Nature. Moscow: Progress., accessed: October 9, 2021.

Foster, John Bellamy (2000) Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Gorz, André (1980) Ecology as Politics. Boston: Southend Press.

________ (1987) Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism. London: Pluto.

Greenland, Hall. (1998). Red Hot: The Life & Times of Nick Origlass, 1908–1996, Wellington Lane Press.

Hampton, Paul (2015) Workers and Trade Unions for Climate Solidarity: Tackling Climate Change in a Neoliberal World. London: Routledge.

Hancock, Alfie (2021) “A People’s Green New Deal: An interview with Max Ajl” Ebb., accessed: October 9, 2021.

Hülsberg, Werner (1988) The German Greens: A Social and Political Profile. London: Verso.

Jarvis, Chris (2021) “6 things we learnt from the first Green Party leadership hustings” Bright Green, accessed: October 9, 2021.

Koffman, Chloe (2021) “Remembering Australia’s Green Bans” Tribune, accessed: October 9, 2021.

Kovel, Joel (2007) The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? London and New York: Zed Press.

Kühn, Andreas (2005) Stalins Enkel, Maos Söhne: die Lebenswelt der K-Gruppen in der Bundesrepublik der 70er Jahre. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag. 

Malm, Andreas (2016) Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso.

________ (2020) Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century. London: Verso.

Mariátegui, José Carlos (1971 [1928]) Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality.  University of Texas Press., accessed: October 9, 2021.

Marx, Karl  (1959 [1894]) Capital. The process of capitalist production as a whole. Volume III. New York: International Publishers.

Norman, Fiona (2019) “Who Killed Cornelius Cardew?” Ebb, accessed: October 9, 2021.

O’Connor, James (1988) Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism. New York: Guilford Press.

Ostrom, Elinor (2019) Governing the Common: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Actions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Parkin, Sara (1989) Green Parties: An International Guide. London: Heretic Books.

Plonska, Ola and Saramifar, Younes (2019) The Urban Gardens of Havana: Seeking Revolutionary Plants in Ideologized. London: Palgrave.

Porritt, Jonathan (1984) Seeing Green: The Politics of Ecology Explained. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Roberts, Alan (1979) The Self-Managing Environment. London: Allison and Busby.

Sankara, Thomas (2018 [1985]) “Imperialism is the arsonist of our forests and savannas”, accessed: October 9, 2021.

Stahnke, Ben (2021)  “Lenin, Ecology, and Revolutionary Russia”, accessed: October 9, 2021.

Tanuro, Daniel (2015) “Environment: The foundations of revolutionary eco-socialism” International Viewpoint, accessed: October 9, 2021.

Thornett, Alan (2019) Facing the Apocalypse: Arguments for Ecosocialism. London: Resistance Books.

Trinder, Matt (2020) “Cuba found to be most sustainably developed country” Green Left, accessed: October 9, 2021.

Trotsky, Leon (1941[1924]) “Trotsky on the Society of the Future” The Militant, 23 August 1941, accessed: October 9, 2021.

Voerman, Gerrit (2006) “Losing colours, turning green” Richardson, Dick and Rootes, Christopher (eds) The Green Challenge. London: Routledge.

Wall, Derek (1994) Weaving a Bower Against Endless Night. An Illustrated History of the Green Party. London: Green Party of England and Wales.

________ (2018) Hugo Blanco: A revolutionary for life. London: Merlin Press.

________ (2020) Climate Strike: The Practical Politics of the Climate Crisis. London: Merlin Press.

Woody, Gus (2020) “Revolutionary Reflections | Moving towards an ecological Leninism”. RS21, accessed: October 9, 2021.

Populate the Internationalist Movement: An Anti-imperialist Critique of Malthus and Neo-Malthusianism

[Image: Ints Vikmanis / shutterstock]

By Michael Thomas Kelly

The 2018 documentary Germans in Namibia opens with an interview in which a wealthy, German-descended landowner blames the economic plight of poor Namibians on overpopulation and unchecked breeding. Malthusian “overpopulation” remains a powerful and frequently used shorthand to deflect from the ongoing legacies of genocide, colonialism, and neo-colonialism. In this paper, I argue that Malthus’ thesis on natural scarcity was primarily a normative argument against social welfare and economic equality. Malthus was wrong, then, in an ethical and political sense in that he provides an ideological framework for population control policies that imperialism and racial capitalism pursue by design – and broadly use to cause harm and maintain systems of oppression. I begin by briefly summarizing Malthus’ original thesis and clarifying how Malthus made a political, not predictive, argument against social equality. I show how neo-Malthusianism works as an ideological justification for how capitalism and imperialism generate surplus populations and maintain inequality – highlighting racial, gender, and spatial components. Drawing from neo-Malthusianism’s critics, I present a different theory of population across geographical space based on anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism.

In his 1798 Essay on Population, Thomas Malthus put forward a vision of natural scarcity, inevitable class division, and checks on exponential rises in population. Malthus asserted that finite resources and unchecked population growth through procreation – “fixed laws of our nature” (Malthus 1798: 5) – inevitably come into conflict. Barnet and Morse (1963: 52) summarize: “The limits of nature constitute scarcity. The dynamic tendency of population to press continually to the borders of subsistence is the driving force.” The conflict between natural resource scarcity and natural population growth, Malthus argued, must necessarily fall on the poorest members of society: “no possible form of society could prevent the almost constant action of misery upon a great part of mankind, if in a state of inequality, and upon all, if all were equal” (Malthus 1798, 11). Malthus also identified “positive checks” on population growth: “Hunger and famine, infanticide and premature death, war and disease” (Kallis 2019, 14).

Critics of Malthus and his original writings explain how he was consciously making a political intervention against revolutionary or redistributive demands. According to Kallis (2019), Malthus had issued “a rebuttal of revolutionary aspirations” (9) and argued that “revolutionaries would cause more harm than good. Malthus wanted to see the abolition of the Poor Laws—a proto-welfare system that provided free food in the parishes” (12). Malthus’s thesis “was not meant as a prediction” (Kallis 2019: 22) but an argument “for the impossibility of a classless society” (23). Similarly, Harvey (1974: 258) characterizes Malthus’ essay “as a political tract against the utopian socialist-anarchism of Godwin and Condorcet and as an antidote to the hopes for social progress aroused by the French Revolution.” Aside from any logical consistency or merit, the essay’s “class character” (Harvey 1974: 259) is what reveals the political intention and function behind the essay and the ideologies it set forth.

More recent proponents of neo-Malthusianism use Malthus’ ideological groundwork to defend private property, uneven development, and structural racism in the context of climate change. For example, Malthus’ Essay presaged arguments that bourgeois economists later made rejecting “redistribution and welfare in the name of free markets” (Kallis 2019: 19). According to Harvey (1974: 262), “Malthus was, in principle, a defender of private property… Private property arrangements inevitably mean an uneven distribution of income, wealth, and the means of production in society.” Both Kallis (2019) and Ojeda, Sasser, and Lunstrum (2020) highlight the popularity – and danger – of natural limits arguments in modern environmental circles. Kallis (2019: 44-45) describes how some 1970s environmental movements “inherited the logic of Malthus,” basing arguments on the fear and supposed impossibility of infinite growth on a finite planet. More recently, Ojeda, Sasser, and Lunstrum (2020: 319) explain: “Influential Western leaders and trend-setters have… argued that climate change can be mitigated by addressing overpopulation.” Highlighting “sharp, uneven geographies,” arguments for “natural scarcity… misdiagnose the causes of climate change, often placing blame on marginalized populations” while doing “little to address the root of the problem” (Ojeda, Sasser, and Lunstrum 2020, 317-318).

Capitalism has a specific use for population – within structurally determined class and social relations – quite apart from the natural limits Malthus invoked to justify inequality. Unlike Malthus, whose theory of population was rooted in human nature and natural scarcity, Marx posited a “law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production” (Harvey 1974, 268). Marx ([1867] 1993: 782-793) argued that an industrial reserve army of labor, or relative surplus population, is necessary under capitalism to discipline the employed working-class and absorb the expansions or contractions of the capitalist market. Relative surplus population is inherent to capitalism and produces poverty and guaranteed unemployment by design: “Marx does not talk about a population problem but a poverty and human exploitation problem. He replaces Malthus’ concept of overpopulation by the concept of a relative surplus population” (Harvey 1974, 269). Ojeda, Sasser, and Lunstrum (2020: 324-325) highlight a contemporary example in which the expansion of palm oil plantations in Colombia had uneven spatial and gendered effects on local populations: “the entry of mitigation projects in the region has resulted in more gender inequality, more dependency of women towards their male partners and their circumscription to domestic spaces” (325). In this case, “natural limits” and “overpopulation” offer no accurate or worthwhile explanation. Instead, this concrete example is better understood as one in which a new plantation market absorbed male wage workers, caused gendered harm in a Global South nation, and showed the limits of climate mitigation in a system in which private property and ownership structures remain intact.

Imperialism and neo-colonialism similarly drive predictable, uneven effects on populations globally, which population control policies and discourses serve to obscure. Harvey (1974: 274) explains: “The overpopulation argument is easily used as a part of an elaborate apologetic through which class, ethnic, or (neo-) colonial repression may be justified.” For example, “several years after Hurricane Katrina, former Louisiana Representative John LaBruzzo… proposed paying people who received state welfare assistance $1,000 to undergo surgical sterilization” (Ojeda, Sasser, and Lunstrum 2020, 320). Also, the US justifies its military presence in Africa through tropes of “overly-reproductive, resource-degrading women” and “the perceived urgency of preemptively addressing climate conflict” (Ojeda, Sasser, and Lunstrum 2020, 321). In both cases, the political function of Malthusianism – that overpopulation will collide with natural resource scarcity – obscures the actual underlying power dynamics. The increased intensity of storms and drought in desert regions are attributable to industrial capital’s emissions of CO2 and play out unevenly across existing racial segregation in the US and neo-colonial underdevelopment in Africa (Rodney [1972] 2018). Global capitalism drives climate apartheid and racialized, gendered poverty, which Malthusians wrongly ascribe to unchecked population and natural limits.

Critiques of Malthus and neo-Malthusianism offer pathways for a different theory of population rooted in principles of anti-imperialism and internationalism. Kallis (2019: 98) locates the following example in terms of limits, but perhaps it is better understood as a struggle over Indigenous sovereignty: “it is the… marginalized who draw limits to stop others from encroaching on their space; think of a community that prevents a multinational corporation from logging its sacred forest.” Relatedly, Ojeda, Sasser, and Lunstrum (2020: 324) explain the gendered aspects of “‘planetary care work’ (Rocheleau 2015), as local communities are largely made responsible for containing and reversing the effects of climate change.” In both cases, ongoing, Indigenous-led efforts to restore relations of stewardship with the world’s land and biodiversity – and overturn existing private property relations and US policy abroad – could better serve oppressed populations. Citing Marx, and critiquing Malthus’ separation of humans and nature, Harvey (1974: 267) suggests that humans can achieve a “unity with nature.” In fact, the “emergence of an abstract nature” in some environmentalist rhetoric implies “the invisibilization of alternative productions of nature and myriad forms of resistance… including localized and feminized experiences of climate change from impoverished and racialized communities in the global south” (Ojeda, Sasser, and Lunstrum 2020, 325). Moving past “human” versus “nature” permits us the necessary nuances, contradictions, and local differences within both non-universal categories of human and nature. Lastly, Kallis (2019: 98) again posits the following demands in terms of limits – minimum wage increase, progressive taxation, working-day reduction – but these are also demands to reduce capital’s essential drive to accumulate, seek profit, and expand. Furthermore, these demands can be strengthened and better contextualized when one considers the working-class’ global dimensions and how relative surplus populations are created and used across various geographical, international, and gendered scales.

Debates over theories of population have important implications for future research and political organizing. Environmental movements can recognize Malthusian arguments as part of a political project against redistribution and revolutionary socialism. Scholars and activists can also grasp how guaranteed unemployment, population control, and ecological damage are attributable to structural, changeable systems of racial capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy – not natural laws. On that principle, organizers can work to build an internationalist movement that understands population, production, and scarcity as socially produced categories that can be placed under forms of collective ownership.

References

Barnett, H.J. and Morse, C. (1963). Scarcity and growth: The economics of natural resource availability. Washington, D.C.: Resources for the Future, 51-71.

Harvey, D. (1974). Population, resources, and the ideology of science. Economic Geography, 50(3), 256-277.

Kallis, G. (2019). Limits: Why Malthus was wrong and why environmentalists should care. Stanford, C.A.: Stanford University Press.

Malthus, T. (1798). An essay on the principle of population. London: J. Johnson, in St. Paul’s Church-Yard.

Marx, K. ([1867] 1993). Capitalism Volume 1. London: Penguin.

Ojeda, D., Sasser, J., and Lunstrum, E. (2020). Malthus’s specter and the Anthropocene. Gender Place and Culture, 27(3), 316-332.

Redfish Media. (2018). Germans in Namibia. Redfish Media. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U2g5K8JaJk

Rodney, W. ([1972] 2018). How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London, U.K.: Verso.