Mapping U.S. Imperialism

By The Mapping Project

Republished from Monthly Review.

The greatest threat looming over our planet, the hegemonistic pretentions of the American Empire are placing at risk the very survival of the human species. We continue to warn you about this danger, and we appeal to the people of the United States and the world to halt this threat, which is like a sword hanging over our heads.

–Hugo Chavez

The United States Military is arguably the largest force of ecological devastation the world has ever known.

–Xoài Pham

Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, and fulfill it or betray it.

–Frantz Fanon

U.S. imperialism is the greatest threat to life on the planet, a force of ecological devastation and disaster impacting not only human beings, but also our non-human relatives. How can we organize to dismantle the vast and complicated network of U.S. imperialism which includes U.S. war and militarism, CIA intervention, U.S. weapons/technology/surveillance corporations, political and economic support for dictatorships, military juntas, death squads and U.S. trained global police forces favorable to U.S. geopolitical interests, U.S. imposed sanctions, so-called “humanitarian interventions,” genetically modified grassroots organizations, corporate media’s manipulation of spontaneous protest, and U.S. corporate sponsorship of political repression and regime change favorable to U.S. corporate interests?

This article deals with U.S. imperialism since World War 2. It is critical to acknowledge that U.S. imperialism emanates both ideologically and materially from the crime of colonialism on this continent which has killed over 100 million indigenous people and approximately 150 million African people over the past 500 years.

The exact death toll of U.S. imperialism is both staggering and impossible to know. What we do know is that since World War 2, U.S. imperialism has killed at least 36 million people globally in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, the Congo, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Chad, Libya, East Timor, Grenada, Honduras, Iran, Pakistan, Panama, the Philippines, Sudan, Greece, Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, Somalia, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Palestine (see Appendix).

This list does not include other aspects of U.S. imperialist aggression which have had a devastating and lasting impact on communities worldwide, including torture, imprisonment, rape, and the ecological devastation wrought by the U.S. military through atomic bombs, toxic waste and untreated sewage dumping by over 750 military bases in over 80 countries. The U.S. Department of Defense consumes more petroleum than any institution in the world. In the year of 2017 alone, the U.S. military emitted 59 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, a carbon footprint greater than that of most nations worldwide. This list also does not include the impact of U.S. fossil fuel consumption and U.S. corporate fossil fuel extraction, fracking, agribusiness, mining, and mono-cropping, all of which are part and parcel of the extractive economy of U.S. imperialism.

U.S. military bases around the world. (Photo: Al Jazeera)

One central mechanism of U.S. imperialism is “dollar hegemony” which forces countries around the world to conduct international trade in U.S. dollars. U.S. dollars are backed by U.S. bonds (instead of gold or industrial stocks) which means a country can only cash in one American IOU for another. When the U.S. offers military aid to friendly nations, this aid is circulated back to U.S. weapons corporations and returns to U.S. banks. In addition, U.S. dollars are also backed by U.S. bombs: any nation that threatens to nationalize resources or go off the dollar (i.e. Iraq or Libya) is threatened with a military invasion and/or a U.S. backed coup.

U.S. imperialism has also been built through “soft power” organizations like USAID, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the Organization of American States (OAS). These nominally international bodies are practically unilateral in their subservience to the interests of the U.S. state and U.S. corporations. In the 1950s and ‘60s, USAID (and its precursor organizations) made “development aid” to Asian, African, and South American countries conditional on those countries’ legal formalization of capitalist property relations, and reorganization of their economies around homeownership debt. The goal was to enclose Indigenous land, and land shared through alternate economic systems, as a method of “combatting Communism with homeownership” and creating dependency and buy-in to U.S. capitalist hegemony (Nancy Kwak, A World of Homeowners). In order to retain access to desperately needed streams of resources (e.g. IMF “loans”), Global South governments are forced to accept resource-extraction by the U.S., while at the same time denying their own people popularly supported policies such as land reform, economic diversification, and food sovereignty. It is also important to note that Global South nations have never received reparations or compensation for the resources that have been stolen from them–this makes the idea of “loans” by global monetary institutions even more outrageous.

The U.S. also uses USAID and other similarly functioning international bodies to suppress and to undermine anti-imperialist struggle inside “friendly” countries. Starting in the 1960s, USAID funded police training programs across the globe under a counterinsurgency model, training foreign police as a “first line of defense against subversion and insurgency.” These USAID-funded police training programs involved surveillance and the creation of biometric databases to map entire populations, as well as programs of mass imprisonment, torture, and assassination. After experimenting with these methods in other countries, U.S. police departments integrated many of them into U.S. policing, especially the policing of BIPOC communities here (see our entry on the Boston Police Department). At the same time, the U.S. uses USAID and other soft power funding bodies to undermine revolutionary, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist movements, by funding “safe” reformist alternatives, including a global network of AFL-CIO managed “training centers” aimed at fostering a bureaucratic union culture similar to the one in the U.S., which keeps labor organizing loyal to capitalism and to U.S. global dominance. (See our entries on the AFL-CIO and the Harvard Trade Union Program.)

U.S. imperialism intentionally fosters divisions between different peoples and nations, offering (relative) rewards to those who choose to cooperate with U.S. dictates (e.g. Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Colombia), while brutally punishing those who do not (e.g. Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela). In this way, U.S. imperialism creates material conditions in which peoples and governments face a choice: 1. accommodate the interests of U.S. Empire and allow the U.S. to develop your nation’s land and sovereign resources in ways which enrich the West; or, 2. attempt to use your land and your sovereign resources to meet the needs of your own people and suffer the brutality of U.S. economic and military violence.

The Harvard Kennedy School: Training Ground for U.S. Empire and the Security State

The Mapping Project set out to map local U.S. imperialist actors (involved in both material and ideological support for U.S. imperialism) on the land of Massachusett, Pawtucket, Naumkeag, and other tribal nations (Boston, Cambridge, and surrounding areas) and to analyze how these institutions interacted with other oppressive local and global institutions that are driving colonization of indigenous lands here and worldwide, local displacement/ethnic cleansing (“gentrification”), policing, and zionist imperialism.

A look at just one local institution on our map, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, demonstrates the level of ideological and material cooperation required for the machinery of U.S. imperialism to function. (All information outlined below is taken from The Mapping Project entries and links regarding the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Please see this link for hyperlinked source material.)

The Harvard Kennedy School of Government and its historical precursors have hosted some of the most infamous war criminals and architects of empire: Henry Kissinger, Samuel Huntington, Susan Rice (an HKS fellow), Madeleine Albright, James Baker, Hillary Clinton, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, and Larry Summers. HKS also currently hosts Ricardo Hausmann, founder and director of Harvard’s Growth Lab , the academic laboratory of the U.S. backed Venezuelan coup.

In How Harvard Rules, John Trumpbour documents the central role Harvard played in the establishment of the Cold War academic-military-industrial complex and U.S. imperialism post-WWII (How Harvard Rules, 51). Trumpbour highlights the role of the Harvard Kennedy School under Dean Graham Allison (1977-1989), in particular, recounting that Dean Allison ran an executive education program for Pentagon officials at Harvard Kennedy (HHR 68). Harvard Kennedy School’s support for the U.S. military and U.S. empire continues to this day. HKS states on its website:

Harvard Kennedy School, because of its mission to train public leaders and its depth of expertise in the study of defense and international security, has always had a particularly strong relationship with the U.S. Armed Forces. This relationship is mutually beneficial. The School has provided its expertise to branches of the U.S. military, and it has given military personnel (active and veteran) access to Harvard’s education and training.

The same webpage further notes that after the removal of ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps) from Harvard Kennedy School in 1969, “under the leadership of Harvard President Drew Faust, the ROTC program was reinstated in 2011, and the Kennedy School’s relationship with the military continues to grow more robust each year.”

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In particular, Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs provides broad support to the U.S. military and the objectives of U.S. empire. The Belfer Center is co-directed by former U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter (a war hawk who has advocated for a U.S. invasion of North Korea and U.S. military build ups against Russia and Iran) and former Pentagon Chief of Staff Eric Rosenbach. Programs within HKS Belfer Center include the Center’s “Intelligence Program,” which boasts that it “acquaints students and Fellows with the intelligence community and its strengths and weaknesses for policy making,” further noting, “Discussions with active and retired intelligence practitioners, scholars of intelligence history, law, and other disciplines, help students and Fellows prepare to best use the information available through intelligence agencies.” Alongside HKS Belfer’s Intelligence Program, is the Belfer Center’s “Recanati-Kaplan Foundation Fellowship.” The Belfer Center claims that, under the direction of Belfer Center co-directors Ashton Carter and Eric Rosenbach, the Recanati-Kaplan Foundation Fellowship “educates the next generation of thought leaders in national and international intelligence.”

As noted above, the Harvard Kennedy School serves as an institutional training ground for future servants of U.S. empire and the U.S. national security state. HKS also maintains a close relationship with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). As reported by Inside Higher Ed in their 2017 review of Spy Schools by Daniel Golden:

[Harvard Kennedy School] currently allows the agency [the CIA] to send officers to the midcareer program at the Kennedy School of Government while continuing to act undercover, with the school’s knowledge. When the officers apply–often with fudged credentials that are part of their CIA cover–the university doesn’t know they’re CIA agents, but once they’re in, Golden writes, Harvard allows them to tell the university that they’re undercover. Their fellow students, however–often high-profile or soon-to-be-high-profile actors in the world of international diplomacy–are kept in the dark.

Kenneth Moskow is one of a long line of CIA officers who have enrolled undercover at the Kennedy School, generally with Harvard’s knowledge and approval, gaining access to up-and-comers worldwide,” Golden writes. “For four decades the CIA and Harvard have concealed this practice, which raises larger questions about academic boundaries, the integrity of class discussions and student interactions, and whether an American university has a responsibility to accommodate U.S. intelligence.”

In addition to the CIA, HKS has direct relationships with the FBI, the U.S. Pentagon, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, NERAC, and numerous branches of the U.S. Armed Forces:

• Chris Combs, a Senior Fellow with HKS’s Program on Crisis Leadership has held numerous positions within the FBI;

• Jeffrey A. Tricoli, who serves as Section Chief of the FBI’s Cyber Division since December 2016 (prior to which he held several other positions within the FBI) was a keynote speaker at “multiple sessions” of the HKS’s Cybersecurity Executive Education program;

• Jeff Fields, who is Fellow at both the Cyber Project and the Intelligence Project of HKS’s Belfer Center currently serves as a Supervisory Special Agent within the National Security Division of the FBI;

• HKS hosted former FBI director James Comey for a conversation with HKS Belfer Center’s Co-Director (and former Pentagon Chief of Staff) Eric Rosenbach in 2020;

• Government spending records show yearly tuition payments from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for Homeland Security personnel attending special HKS seminars on Homeland Security under HKS’s Program on Crisis Leadership;

• Northeast Homeland Security Regional Advisory Council meeting minutes from February 2022 list “Edward Chao: Analyst, Harvard Kennedy School,” as a NERAC “Council Member”; and

• Harvard Kennedy School and the U.S. Air force have created multiple fellowships aimed at recruiting U.S. Air Force service members to pursue degrees at HKS. The Air Force’s CSAF Scholars Master Fellowship, for example, aims to “prepare mid-career, experienced professionals to return to the Air Force ready to assume significant leadership positions in an increasingly complex environment.” In 2016, Harvard Kennedy School Dean Doug Elmendorf welcomed Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James to Harvard Kennedy School, in a speech in which Elmendorf highlighted his satisfaction that the ROTC program, including Air Force ROTC, had been reinstated at Harvard (ROTC had been removed from campus following mass faculty protests in 1969).

Harvard Kennedy School’s web.

The Harvard Kennedy School and the War Economy

HKS’s direct support of U.S. imperialism does not limit itself to ideological and educational support. It is deeply enmeshed in the war economy driven by the interests of the U.S. weapons industry.

Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, L3 Harris, General Dynamics, and Northrup Grumman are global corporations who supply the United States government with broad scale military weaponry and war and surveillance technologies. All these companies have corporate leadership who are either alumni of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government (HKS), who are currently contributing to HKS as lecturers/professors, and/or who have held leadership positions in U.S. federal government.

Lockheed Martin Vice President for Corporate Business Development Leo Mackay is a Harvard Kennedy School alumnus (MPP ’91), was a Fellow in the HKS Belfer Center International Security Program (1991-92) and served as the “military assistant” to then U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy Ashton Carter, who would soon go on to become co-director of the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center. Following this stint at the U.S. Pentagon, Mackay landed in the U.S. weapons industry at Lockheed Martin.  Lockheed Martin Vice President Marcel Lettre is an HKS alumni and prior to joining Lockheed Martin, Lettre spent eight years in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). The U.S. DoD has dished out a whopping $540.82 billion to date in contracts with Lockheed Martin for the provision of products and services to the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and other branches of the U.S. military. Lockheed Martin Board of Directors member Jeh Johnson has lectured at Harvard Kennedy School and is the former Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the agency responsible for carrying out the U.S. federal government’s regime of tracking, detentions, and deportations of Black and Brown migrants. (Retired) General Joseph F. Dunford is currently a member of two Lockheed Martin Board of Director Committees and a Senior Fellow with HKS’s Belfer Center. Dunford was a U.S. military leader, serving as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Commander of all U.S. and NATO Forces in Afghanistan. Dunford also serves on the board of the Atlantic Council, itself a cutout organization of NATO and the U.S. security state which crassly promotes the interests of U.S. empire. Mackay, Lettre, Johnson, and Dunford’s respective career trajectories provide an emblematic illustration of the grotesque revolving door which exists between elite institutions of knowledge production like the Harvard Kennedy School, the U.S. security state (which feeds its people into those elite institutions and vice versa), and the U.S. weapons industry (which seeks business from the U.S. security state).

Similar revolving door phenomena are notable among the Harvard Kennedy School and Raytheon, Boeing, and Northrup Grumman. HKS Professor Meghan O’Sullivan currently serves on the board of Massachusetts-based weapons manufacturer Raytheon. O’Sullivan is also deeply enmeshed within America’s security state, currently sitting on the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations and has served as “special assistant” to President George W. Bush (2004-07) where she was “Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan,” helping oversee the U.S. invasions and occupations of these nations during the so-called “War on Terror.” O’Sullivan has openly attempted to leverage her position as Harvard Kennedy School to funnel U.S. state dollars into Raytheon: In April 2021, O’Sullivan penned an article in the Washington Post entitled “It’s Wrong to Pull Troops Out of Afghanistan. But We Can Minimize the Damage.” As reported in the Harvard Crimson, O’Sullivan’s author bio in this article highlighted her position as a faculty member of Harvard Kennedy (with the perceived “expertise” affiliation with HKS grants) but failed to acknowledge her position on the Board of Raytheon, a company which had “a $145 million contract to train Afghan Air Force pilots and is a major supplier of weapons to the U.S. military.” Donn Yates who works in Domestic and International Business Development at Boeing’s T-7A Redhawk Program was a National Security Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2015-16. Don Yates also spent 23 years in the U.S. Air Force. Former Northrop Grumman Director for Strategy and Global Relations John Johns is a graduate of Harvard Kennedy’s National and International Security Program. Johns also spent “seven years as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Maintenance establishing policy for, and leading oversight of the Department’s annual $80B weapon system maintenance program and deployed twice in support of security operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The largest U.S. oil firms are also closely interlocked with these top weapons companies, which have also diversified their technological production for the security industry–providing services for pipeline and energy facility security, as well as border security. This means that the same companies are profiting at every stage in the cycle of climate devastation: they profit from wars for extraction; from extraction; and from the militarized policing of people forced to migrate by climate disaster. Exxon Mobil (the 4th largest fossil fuel firm) contracts with General Dynamics, L3 Harris, and Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin, the top weapons company in the world, shares board members with Chevron, and other global fossil fuel companies. (See Global Climate Wall: How the world’s wealthiest nations prioritise borders over climate action.)

The Harvard Kennedy School and U.S. Support for Israel

U.S. imperialist interests in West Asia are directly tied to U.S. support of Israel. This support is not only expressed through tax dollars but through ideological and diplomatic support for Israel and advocacy for regional normalization with Israel.

Harvard Kennedy School is home to the Wexner Foundation. Through its “Israel Fellowship,” The Wexner Foundation awards ten scholarships annually to “outstanding public sector directors and leaders from Israel,” helping these individuals to pursue a Master’s in Public Administration at the Kennedy School. Past Wexner fellows include more than 25 Israeli generals and other high-ranking military and police officials. Among them is the Israeli Defense Force’s current chief of general staff, Aviv Kochavi, who is directly responsible for the bombardment of Gaza in May 2021. Kochavi also is believed to be one of the 200 to 300 Israeli officials identified by Tel Aviv as likely to be indicted by the International Criminal Court’s probe into alleged Israeli war crimes committed in Gaza in 2014. The Wexner Foundation also paid former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak–himself accused of war crimes in connection with Israel’s 2009 Operation Cast Lead that killed over 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza–$2.3 million for two studies, one of which he did not complete.

HKS’s Belfer Center has hosted Israeli generals, politicians, and other officials to give talks at Harvard Kennedy School. Ehud Barak, mentioned above, was himself a “Belfer fellow” at HKS in 2016. The Belfer Center also hosts crassly pro-Israel events for HKS students, such as: The Abraham Accords – A conversation on the historic normalization of relations between the UAE, Bahrain and Israel,” “A Discussion with Former Mossad Director Tamir Pardo,” “The Future of Modern Warfare” (which Belfer describes as “a lunch seminar with Yair Golan, former Deputy Chief of the General Staff for the Israel Defense Forces”), and “The Future of Israel’s National Security.”

As of 2022, Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center is hosting former Israel military general and war criminal Amos Yadlin as a Senior Fellow at the Belfer’s Middle East Initiative. Furthermore, HKS is allowing Yadlin to lead a weekly study group of HKS students entitled “Israeli National Security in a Shifting Middle East: Historical and Strategic Perspectives for an Uncertain Future.” Harvard University students wrote an open letter demanding HKS “sever all association with Amos Yadlin and immediately suspend his study group.” Yadlin had defended Israel’s assassination policy through which the Israeli state has extrajudicially killed hundreds of Palestinians since 2000, writing that the “the laws and ethics of conventional war did not apply” vis-á-vis Palestinians under zionist occupation.

Harvard Kennedy School also plays host to the Harvard Kennedy School Israel Caucus. The HKS Israel Caucus coordinates “heavily subsidized” trips to Israel for 50 HKS students annually. According to HKS Israel Caucus’s website, students who attend these trips “meet the leading decision makers and influencers in Israeli politics, regional security and intelligence, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, [and] the next big Tech companies.” The HKS Israel Caucus also regularly hosts events which celebrate “Israel’s culture and history.” Like the trips to Israel they coordinate, HKS Israel Caucus events consistently whitewash over the reality of Israel’s colonial war against the Palestinian people through normalizing land theft, forced displacement, and resource theft.

Harvard Kennedy School also has numerous ties to local pro-Israel organizations: the ADL, the JCRC, and CJP.

The Harvard Kennedy School’s Support for Saudi Arabia

In 2017, Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center announced the launch of “The Project on Saudi and Gulf Cooperation Council Security,” which Belfer stated was “made possible through a gift from HRH Prince Turki bin Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia.” Through this project, Harvard Kennedy School and the HKS Belfer Center have hosted numerous events at HKS which have promoted Saudi Arabia as a liberalizing and positive force for security and stability in the region, whitewashing over the realities of the Saudi-led and U.S.-backed campaign of airstrikes and blockade against Yemen which has precipitated conditions of mass starvation and an epidemic of cholera amongst the Yemeni people.

The Belfer Center’s Project on Saudi and Gulf Cooperation Council Security further normalizes and whitewashes Saudi Arabia’s crimes through its “HKS Student Delegation to Saudi Arabia.” This delegation brings 11 Harvard Kennedy School students annually on two-week trips to Saudi Arabia, where students “exchange research, engage in cultural dialogue, and witness the changes going on in the Kingdom firsthand.” Not unlike the student trips to Israel Harvard Kennedy School’s Israel Caucus coordinates, these trips to Saudi Arabia present HKS students with a crassly propagandized impression of Saudi Arabia, shoring up support for the “Kingdom” amongst the future leaders of the U.S. security state which HKS seeks to nurture.

THE MAPPING PROJECT’S Mission

The vast network outlined above between the Harvard Kennedy School, the U.S. federal government, the U.S. Armed Forces, and the U.S. weapons industry constitutes only a small portion of what is known about HKS and its role in U.S. imperialism, but it is enough.

The Mapping Project demonstrates that the Harvard Kennedy School of Government is a nexus of U.S. imperialist planning and cooperation, with an address. The Mapping Project also links HKS to harms locally, including, but not limited to colonialism, violence against migrants, ethnic cleansing/displacement of Black and Brown Boston area residents from their communities (“gentrification”), health harm, policing, the prison-industrial complex, zionism, and surveillance. The Harvard Kennedy School’s super-oppressor status – the sheer number of separate communities feeling its global impact in their daily lives through these multiple and various mechanisms of oppression and harm – as it turns out, is its greatest weakness.

A movement that can identify super-oppressors like the Harvard Kennedy School of Government can use this information to identify strategic vulnerabilities of key hubs of power and effectively organize different communities towards common purpose. This is what the Mapping Project aims to do–to move away from traditionally siloed work towards coordination across communities and struggles in order to build strategic oppositional community power.

Appendix: The Death Toll of U.S. Imperialism Since World War 2

A critical disclaimer: Figures relating to the death toll of U.S. Imperialism are often grossly underestimated due to the U.S. government’s lack of transparency and often purposeful coverup and miscounts of death tolls. In some cases, this can lead to ranges of figures that include millions of human lives–as in the figure for Indonesia below with estimates of 500,000 to 3 million people. We have tried to provide the upward ranges in these cases since we suspect the upward ranges to be more accurate if not still significantly underestimated. These figures were obtained from multiple sources including but not limited to indigenous scholar Ward Churchill’s Pacifism as Pathology as well as Countercurrents’ article Deaths in Other Nations Since WWII Due to U.S. Interventions (please note that use of Countercurrents’ statistics isn’t an endorsement of the site’s politics).

• Afghanistan: at least 176,000 people

• Bosnia: 20,000 to 30,000 people

• Bosnia and Krajina: 250,000 people

• Cambodia: 2-3 million people

• Chad: 40,000 people and as many as 200,000 tortured

• Chile: 10,000 people (the U.S. sponsored Pinochet coup in Chile)

• Colombia: 60,000 people

• Congo: 10 million people (Belgian imperialism supported by U.S. corporations and the U.S. sponsored assassination of Patrice Lumumba)

• Croatia: 15,000 people

• Cuba: 1,800 people

• Dominican Republic: at least 3,000 people

• East Timor: 200,000 people

• El Salvador: More than 75,000 people (U.S. support of the Salvadoran oligarchy and death squads)

• Greece: More than 50,000 people

• Grenada: 277 people

• Guatemala: 140,000 to 200,000 people killed or forcefully disappeared (U.S. support of the Guatemalan junta)

• Haiti: 100,000 people

• Honduras: hundreds of people (CIA supported Battalion kidnapped, tortured and killed at least 316 people)

• Indonesia: Estimates of 500,000 to 3 million people

• Iran: 262,000 people

• Iraq: 2.4 million people in Iraq war, 576, 000 Iraqi children by U.S. sanctions, and over 100,000 people in Gulf War

• Japan: 2.6-3.1 million people

• Korea: 5 million people

• Kosovo: 500 to 5,000

• Laos: 50,000 people

• Libya: at least 2500 people

• Nicaragua: at least 30,000 people (U.S. backed Contras’ destabilization of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua)

• Operation Condor: at least 10,000 people (By governments of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru. U.S. govt/CIA coordinated training on torture, technical support, and supplied military aid to the Juntas)

• Pakistan: at least 1.5 million people

• Palestine: estimated more than 200,000 people killed by military but this does not include death from blockade/siege/settler violence

• Panama: between 500 and 4000 people

• Philippines: over 100,000 people executed or disappeared

• Puerto Rico: 4,645-8,000 people

• Somalia: at least 2,000 people

• Sudan: 2 million people

• Syria: at least 350,000 people

• Vietnam: 3 million people

• Yemen: over 377,000 people

• Yugoslavia: 107,000 people

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.

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“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.

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.

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The End of Growth?: The Capitalist Economy and Ecological Crisis

By Conor Payne and Chris Stewart

Republished from Socialist Alternative.

Many ecologists, activists and academics argue that an obsession with economic growth is the cause of our current ecological crisis and a commitment to “degrowing” the economy is the solution.

Too often, however, this discussion lacks a sufficient class or anti-capitalist content and workers are blamed for our supposedly destructive “consumption patterns”. Instead, socialists should be clear that the cause of the climate crisis is the capitalist system and its incessant drive to accumulate profits, and that the only way to solve the crisis is to struggle for a socialist world where human need, including a sustainable relation to nature, comes before private greed.

Capitalism’s “boom and bust” cycle

Under capitalism, the driving force of the economy is the pursuit of profit. The competition between companies and even different capitalist powers for markets and resources means that this drive for profit is relentless and expansive. Therefore, capitalism also involves a continuous quest for economic growth.

At the same time, these companies will seek to “externalize” the cost of their activities, to leave them to be paid by someone else. The capitalist firm doesn’t care on what basis it grows; whether its products are useful or cause harm, or if its activities are environmentally sustainable.

Capitalism is a system of contradictions. The capitalists get their profits by exploiting workers, as well as the resources extracted from nature in the labor process. The constant need to accumulate more profits means capitalism extracts more and more resources in increasingly destructive ways, ultimately leading to the depletion of soils, minerals, forests, the life in our oceans etc — which undermines the system’s own sources of wealth.

Capitalism is increasingly coming up against the ecological barrier to its unrestrained development, as seen in mounting natural disasters, the recent shutdown of the power system in Texas, and a global pandemic, all at least partly attributable to humanity’s increasing incursions into nature.

As well as this, capitalism is a system that primarily organizes investment through the chaos of the stock market, where investment is motivated only by the pursuit of profit. Today, capitalists increasingly choose to speculate with their wealth through complex financial products that have little relation to actual value in society – what Marx termed “fictitious capital”. This is because they can make more short-term profits here than they can through actual productive investment.

At the same time, the desire of the capitalists to drive down the share of wealth that goes to the working class means that workers collectively are not able to buy all the goods the capitalists put to market. This is one way that capitalist growth eventually comes up against its limits and throws the system into crisis and recession. We are now experiencing this process of crisis in Ireland and internationally for the second time in just over a decade.

When growth has been rooted in productive investment, it has often led also to increases in working class living standards, although workers’ gains are usually dwarfed by those of corporations and the rich. Periods of economic growth, for example in the decades following World War 2, were also sometimes used by capitalist governments to grant social reforms in the interests of working people, such as pensions, public health and education services, welfare protections etc. This was done not out of any innate kindness but as a mechanism to stave off potential revolutionary challenges to the system from the working class.

However, in the preceding decades of neo-liberal capitalism, the basis for growth has been precisely the reduction of the share of wealth going to the working class. Capitalism has suppressed wages, gutted public services, eroded economic security. Inequality has exploded as the gains of economic growth congealed at the top. At the same time, the capitalists have promoted more and more consumption fueled in significant measure by debt. This means that today capitalist economic growth often means little real gain for working class people.

The recovery from the great recession of ’08 was largely a joyless one. This was illustrated graphically here in Ireland in the 2020 election when the establishment did not benefit from any “feel good” factor whatsoever — in fact suffering a historic defeat. This was despite nominally impressive growth rates in the preceding years. The recovery did not alter the reality of low pay, precarity and housing distress. In Britain, the Office of National Statistics found that, despite a decade of “growth”, real wages only recovered to the level of 2008 at the end of 2019 — just in time for the next crisis! At the same time, the numbers on zero hours contracts were the highest on record, at just under a million workers.1

Meanwhile, the mounting burden of ecological breakdown will not be shared equally; as those with wealth move to insulate themselves from the consequences of the economic system they have profited from. As unprecedentedly low temperatures drove catastrophic power outages in Texas, working-class, poor and minority neighborhoods bore the brunt of the power cuts while empty skyscrapers lit up the city skyline.

Karl Marx said that under capitalism: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.”2 This sums up the capitalist economy today. At the same time, of course, workers are still liable to pay the price when the system goes into recession. The reality is that at no stage in its cycle of boom and bust, does the capitalist economy operate in the interests of the working class.

An economy for need, not greed

While economic growth undoubtedly drives carbon emissions and all forms of environmental destruction, contraction on a capitalist basis does not deliver an equivalent let up in environmental intensity. According to one study, examining 150 countries over the period of 1960-2008, a 1% increase in GDP meant on average a 0.73% increase in carbon emissions, while a 1% decline in GDP meant only a 0.4% decrease in carbon emissions.3 This is because the environmentally inefficient goods and infrastructure created during a boom generally continue in use during a downturn. Less consumption in itself can never deliver the necessary reduction in carbon emissions. Instead we need a fundamental change in how we produce.

This means that without a planned transition to a sustainable means of life the tendency will be for ever increasing emissions. So the debate about growth and degrowth is useless unless linked to the need to bring an end to the chaos of the capitalist market.

The purpose of the capitalist economy is to deliver increased profit for the bosses. The purpose of the economy under socialism would be to fulfill human need in a sustainable way. This means taking the key sectors of the economy out of the hands of big business and bringing them into public ownership, under democratic control. This means we can reorganize the energy industry, transport, agribusiness and production overall on a planned basis, in the interests of both people and the planet.

Socialists want a better life for the vast majority on this earth. We know many, even in the richer countries, are in poverty or barely keeping their heads above water, do not have access to decent housing or healthcare, or have no economic security for the future. We believe this to be completely unjustifiable in a world of incredible abundance. For this reason, we reject attacks on working-class living standards, even those that are introduced with an environmental veneer, e.g. water charges, or carbon taxes.

The vast majority of the world’s population is responsible for very little in terms of carbon emissions. A recent UN report shows that globally the top 1% of earners are responsible for a yearly per capita average of 74 tons of C02 per year. Meanwhile for the bottom 50% of earners the figure is 0.7 tons.4 In much of the world a socialist system would need to increase production on a sustainable basis and redistribute wealth. Even in the wealthier capitalist countries many sectors that are not prioritized for capitalist investment would need to be expanded under a socialist system, not reduced — healthcare, housing, renewable energy for a start.

A world of waste

At the same time, capitalist production involves enormous waste. We should not underestimate the extent of this:

• 690 million people around the world went hungry in 2019, with the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation projecting that the impact of the pandemic could add a further 132 million people to that number.5 Yet, during the pandemic, the closure of restaurants and other disruptions cause the widespread dumping of perfectly good produce. Even in “normal” times, while the world already produces enough food to feed everyone, a minimum of one third of this food is lost or wasted. Many things cause this but the status of food as a commodity to be sold for profit is at the centre of the problem. Agribusiness leaves food to rot in the fields to keep prices high, supermarkets throw out edible food they don’t think they can sell, good food is even discarded because its size or shape makes it “unmarketable”.6

• In 2020, approximately $569 billion was spent on advertising, projected to grow to $612 billion this year.7 You can add to this, the resources spent on sales promotion, public relations, “direct marketing” and other forms of corporate self-promotion. The vast bulk of this money is wasted, spent not to inform us but to convince us to buy as much as possible or to buy one identical brand of a product over another, often preying on our anxieties and insecurities in order to create false needs in our minds that can be “solved” through consumption.

• Because capitalism doesn’t produce for need but for profit, advertising and marketing become bound up with the process of production itself. The packaging industry is now the third largest on earth and much packaging is not mainly functional but a form of product promotion. Packaging costs amount to somewhere between 10% and 40% of total product cost.8

• Planned obsolescence means that products are consciously not built to be durable and must be frequently replaced by consumers. This includes fast fashion made from low quality material and electronics with batteries that can’t be replaced, contributing to 500 million tonnes of E-waste in 2019.9

• There are a plethora of other industries and products of no use to working-class people: from the armaments industry producing weapons of death, to luxury goods like private jets — an industry which has benefitted from a raft of new, wealthy customers seeking to avoid commercial flights during the pandemic. As a result of yet another capitalist speculative bubble, the cryptocurrency Bitcoin now consumes more energy than all of Argentina, a country of 45 million people.

• Competition between firms means that research and development efforts are often duplicated.

As we can see, the mountains of waste produced under capitalism are not a product mainly of the demands of consumers, but instead serve the needs of capitalist profiteering. The structure of capitalist society itself also partly conditions our consumer needs. Those who don’t live near reliable public transport “need” to buy cars, people on low incomes will “choose” to buy fast fashion etc.

To create more and more products that aren’t needed or will be sent rapidly to landfill, or to generate more and more artificial demand is all “growth” in capitalist terms, but it isn’t human progress. A democratic, planned economy could do “more with less” as part of a planned ecological transition — retooling useless or destructive industries, eliminating duplication, overproduction and planned obsolescence, focusing on fulfilling needs not generating artificial wants and transforming agriculture, transport and energy production on a sustainable basis. In such a system whole industries, communities and cities would be planned democratically and on a completely different basis, putting an end to capitalist overproduction and waste and allowing for a more rational allocation of resources.

Sustainable future means socialist planning

Some argue that a simple transition to renewable energy will solve the ecological problems we face. This transition is both necessary and possible, but won’t be done under capitalism that will extract every source of fossil fuels down to the last, so long as there is profit to be made from them.

But even if this were achieved, we would still face a range of looming ecological catastrophes. The fact is that capitalism is already exceeding a number of planetary boundaries for safeguarding a safe environment for human civilization on earth.

These include species extinction, soil degradation and deforestation, to name only a few. Their common source is the increasing scale and intensity of humanity’s incursions into nature, which are now undermining the basis of our own existence on the planet.

Nor will technological changes alone solve the problem of a sustainable relationship with nature. Under capitalism, the opposite is the case: while technological changes result in the more efficient use of energy, this then creates the basis for further expansion and so paradoxically technological development often results in a net increase in the amount of energy used.10

While technology may alter to some degree what the limits are, we have to accept the reality that “you can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet”. Capitalism means an increasingly destructive and frantic search for resources that can be extracted and land which can be developed, with the benefits of this activity more and more concentrated in the hands of the few.

Socialist planning can ensure the rational development of the quality of our lives without increasing environmental intensity. Only on this basis can we restructure our society around need, not profit, creating countless socially necessary jobs in pursuit of building a sustainable system.

Socialists stand for massive investment in low carbon jobs and sustainable infrastructure, as well as the introduction of a four-day work-week with no loss of pay. This would not only solve the problem of permanent unemployment under capitalism by distributing work to all those who need it, but would also free workers up to participate in political and economic decision-making, and would achieve a better balance between work, our social lives and leisure.

This will still pose complex questions about how products, industries and practices can be maintained, but these are best resolved on the basis of democratic discussion in a society founded on equality and solidarity.

Notes

1. Richard Partington, Feb 18, 2020 “Average Wages Top Pre-Financial Crisis Levels”, The Guardian, www.theguardian.com 

2. Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, www.marxists.org

3. Richard York, Oct 7, 2012, “Asymmetric effects of economic growth and decline on CO2 emissions”, Nature Climate Change, www.nature.com

4. UN Environment Program “Emissions Gap Report 2020”, Dec 9, 2020 

5. UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, July 13, 2020, “As more go hungry and malnutrition persists, achieving Zero Hunger by 2030 in doubt, UN report warns”, www.fao.org

6. Andrew Smolski, Mar 29, 2017, “Capital’s Hunger in Abundance”, Jacobin, jacobinmag.com

7. Brad Adgate, Dec 14, 2020, “Ad Agency Forecast: Expect The Advertising Market To Rebound In 2021”, Forbes, www.forbes.com

8. John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, 2020, The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift, Monthly Review Press, p. 364

9. John Harris, Apr 15, 2020, “Planned obsolescence: the outrage of our electronic waste mountain”, The Guardian, www.theguardian.com

10. Foster and Clark, 2020, p.352-3.

‘Ecological Leninism’: On Waging War Against the Common Cause of Corona and the Climate Crisis

By Justin Reynolds

Republished from Curious.

What is the connection between the coronavirus and the climate crisis? Andreas Malm’s brilliant polemic Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century, written within a matter of weeks as the worldwide lockdown took hold, argues that their common root and cure are in plain view, if we are willing to see, and act.

COVID-19 is not an act of God that came out of a clear blue sky, but, like climate change, the consequence of rapacious extraction of the Earth’s resources. As we pry ever deeper into the primordial wildernesses where viruses lurk for materials and animals to buy and sell, hacking down tropical forests, blowing up limestone caverns, and draining wetlands, we drive out the diseases and their carriers: bats, rats, mice, anthropods, mosquitoes and locusts. For Malm it’s ‘rather as if the human economy had resolved to lift up the container of coronaviruses and other pathogens and pour the load over itself.’

The book is shot through with biblical imagery of plague and pestilence, but Malm finds his lodestar in the urgent rhetoric of a 20th century prophet. The Bolshevik leader Lenin, surveying the desperate situation of Russia in September 1917, riven by war, famine and economic breakdown, urged that the powers of the state must be seized and directed against what he saw as the root causes of the crisis of his day–the chronic conflict generated by warring capitalist empires. Malm sketches an ‘ecological Leninism’ for today, a programme for marshalling the hard power of the state to rewire an economic system that is destroying us.

Use of the imagery of ‘war communism’ is bold even for the Marxist writer of Fossil Capital and The Progress of this Storm. But if Malm offends, that is his intention: ‘When there is a threat to the health or even physical existence of a population one doesn’t leave it to the least conscientious individuals to play with the fire as they want. One snatches the matches out of their hands.’

Disturbing the hornets’ nest

Our crisis, he argues, is systemic. Individual, companies, industries and nations do not intend to destabilise the conditions that support our civilisation by ripping up the planet’s ecosystems. The economic machine in which they are entangled is hardwired to do so. And as it careers onwards it disturbs more and more of the pathogens that have lived for millions of years in the depths of tropical forests, the recesses of cave systems, and the mephitic atmospheres of marshes, lagoons and swamps.

Most of those viruses have been contained within the luxuriant ecosystems that proliferate around the equator, able to move between thousands of hosts before exhausting themselves. There has always been the possibility of ‘Zoonotic spillover’, the process by which a microbe leaps from its habitual animal carrier to a human intruder. These transmissions are only as frequent as we allow them to be: so long as we don’t poke our hand into the hornets’ nest, we don’t get stung.

But as widening circuits of global trade have compelled the clearing of ancient forests, the mining of caverns and the bleeding dry of wetlands, the natural barriers between humans and the carriers of pathogens are breaking down.

Soaring demand for beef, soybean, palm oil and wood accounts for much of the depletion, as loggers and farmers cut into the heart of great forests such as the Amazon, the Ecuadorian Yasuni and the Indonesian Harapan. Some 70 per cent of the total agricultural land of Malaysia and Indonesia is now devoted exclusively to the production of palm oil. The hydrocarbons and mining industries have also established their presence, opening up timeless fastnesses such as the peatlands of the Congo basin, an ancient rainforest harbouring colonies of viruses that have slept undisturbed–until now.

And as the loggers and drillers move in, the pathogens and their carriers flood out: rats, mosquitos, insects, and, above all, bats, the most effective of viral agents, sheltering thousands of coronaviruses in dense roosts where as many as 3,000 individuals can congregate in a square metre.

The hollowing out of the world’s great biospheres has–and continues to be–primarily driven by demand from wealthy northern countries for ever more rarefied commodities:

[T]he American appetite for hamburgers is satisfied from pastures carved out of the Amazon. The import of coffee to the North presupposes deforestation in the tropical belt. Chocolate consumed in the most tremendous quantities in Switzerland, Germany and Austria and supplied by a mirroring top trio of Ivory Coast, Ghana and Indonesia comes from cocoa trees grown where wild forests once stood.

‘A drizzle of viruses’

Increasingly intense extraction has seeded a bloom of viruses. Since the turn of the millennium outbreaks have followed in quick succession: Nipah, West Nile, SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika. The coronavirus is merely the first to move beyond their habitual seedbeds in Asia, Africa and South America.

The replication of northern consumption patterns in Southeast Asia provided the ideal conditions for the genesis of COVID-19. The wet markets of Wuhan have become ever more decadent and reckless in response to demand from prosperous consumers. Just as the western world increasingly demands novelties such as zebra steaks, crocodile sausages, whale, camel and python meat, so Wuhan’s wealthy patrons have come to expected ever more carnivalesque displays of pangolins, flying-foxes, racoons, dogs and rats.

Nearly 20 per cent of all the world’s species have now been commodified. And, as at Wuhan, viruses lurk among them. Unrestrained consumption ‘violently shakes the tree where bats and other animals live. Out falls a drizzle of viruses.’

Extraction means global heating, which means more viruses. Depletion of forests and wetlands diminishes their capacity to soak up and sequester carbon dioxide. And rising global temperatures open opportunities for the carriers of pathogens to move northwards beyond their ancient tropical habitats. An alarming story somewhat lost amid the noise when the pandemic took hold was the appearance of swarms of locusts more than 20 times larger than normal–embodying an area three times that of New York–across east African and west Asia. As temperatures rise they may even be able to glide over the mountain ranges that until now have confined them to southern regions.

The pandemic has inspired comparison with the great plagues of the past. But Malm suggests our predicament is different and, modern medicine not withstanding, in some ways worse. He acknowledges the parallels with the decline and fall of Rome drawn in Kyle Harper’s intriguing 2017 study The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, detailing how imperial expansion pulled in diseases causing outbreaks that shook the classical world’s foundations with catastrophes such as the Antoninian and Justinian Plagues.

But empires have risen and fallen and risen again. Today’s pandemics are entangled with climate change, a chronic ecological rupture. COVID-19 threatens to be one of ‘an avalanche of missiles’ that will continue to rain down over centuries. The process can only be stopped by inoculating ourselves against the unchecked extraction that Malm, in one of the book’s boldest images, suggests is itself a virus:

Capital doesn’t mean to destroy the intricate cellular structures of wild nature; it doesn’t have an intention formed in the mind and then engage in efforts to realise it–there is just no other way for it to replicate. … Unlike other parasites, this one cannot stay content with vegetating in the furs or veins of other species for millions of years of co-evolutionary equilibrium. It can subsist solely by expanding and, in this sense, it exhibits a sort of permanent pandemicity; it doesn’t return to lurk in the shadows until the next visitation, like Ebola or Nipah. Once it had leapt out its reservoir host on the British Isles, it commenced the long historical work of subsuming wild nature on this planet, be it in the form of a palm oil plantation, a bauxite mine, a wet market or a rat farm. All of these and uncountable other entities represent wild nature dragged into the chain of value, and given the biological fact that pathogenic microbes are constituent elements of such nature, capital must call them up too.

Impending catastrophe, then and now

Looking for a way forward, Malm, whose previous works have elaborated Marx’s concept of metabolic rift–the imbalance in our relationship with nature wrought by unsustainable production–turns to Lenin’s essay The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It, written on the eve of the 1917 October Revolution.

There, Lenin, drawing on Marx’s stark assessment in the The Communist Manifesto that the fight for socialism will end ‘either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes’, argued that the devastation wrought by the war was the inevitable endpoint of competition between empires for resources: humanity had to ‘choose between perishing’ or transitioning to ‘a superior mode of production’.

For Lenin the way out was both impossible and obvious: to dare to use ‘the rich store of control measures’ the Russian government, like the other warring nations, had already designed and exercised during the conflict to plan production and prevent food systems collapsing. But with a critical difference: rather than being employed to defend the status quo they should be used to overturn it. The powers of the capitalist state should be used against capitalism itself.

Like Lenin, Malm rejects the left alternatives of social democracy and anarchism as inadequate to the scale of the crisis. Social democracy is fatally entangled with a capitalist system of overproduction that is the root cause of our predicament. And by forsaking the power of the state anarchism denies itself the agency necessary to act at sufficient scale. Lenin urged something new: a state prepared to use its powers to wrench Russia onto a new path: to withdraw from the war, to commandeer the grain supply, to take control of the banking system, to redirect production for communal need.

Malm imagines what a systematic climate change programme charged with similar urgency might look like. It would audit supply chains and import flows to determine the extent of resource extraction from the south to the north. It would pare those supply chains down to a minimum of essential goods. It would redirect resources to the rewinding and reforesting of regions worn down by northern consumption. It would ban the import of meat, especially beef, investing plant proteins. And so on: in brief, it would do whatever is necessary to establish trade circuits that do not continually extract and exploit. Above all, it would require planning: ‘Comprehensive, airtight planning. Everybody knows this. Few say it.’

Malm points to recent instances of where a strong state has pushed through the noise and forced through effective climate change mitigation measures. During his tenure as Brazilian President, Lula oversaw a significant reduction in the deforestation of the Amazon, expanding protected areas and enforcing forest codes against illegal logging, measures that slashed Brazil’s CO2 emissions by some 40 per cent. And although the Chinese state’s prolific use of coal has been an environmental catastrophe, it has pushed through a massive reforestation programme.

Malm echoes Lenin’s call that ‘war must be declared on the oil barons and shareholders’. For Lenin that meant socialising the industry to ramp up production for the construction of a new Soviet state. Today we need public control to manage the sunsetting of the industry. But radically reducing fossil fuel production and phasing out carbon emissions will not be enough. We need to drawdown the excess carbon already in the atmosphere. The exceptional circumstances of the pandemic reduced emissions by some 5 per cent. But a 7.6 per cent reduction is needed every year over the next decade to keep within the Paris Agreement targets.

Only the state has the power to roll out the direct air capture technologies we need at sufficient scale. And only the state can redirect the oil and gas industry away from carbon production towards carbon capture and burial: ‘The demand for nationalising fossil fuel companies and turning them into direct air capture utilities should be the central transitional demand for the coming years.’

An ‘acid taste’

Malm acknowledges that the harsh language of ‘rationing, reallocating, requisitioning, sanctioning, ordering’ leaves an ‘acid taste’. But this is what needs to be done:

Here we truly are in the situation of Lenin’s September text: everybody knows what measures need to be taken; everybody knows, on some level of their consciousness, that flights inside continents should stay grounded, private jets banned, cruise ships safely dismantled, turbines and panels mass produced–there’s a whole auto industry waiting for the order–subways and bus lines expanded, high-speed rail lines built, old houses refurbished and all the magnificent rest.

The ‘classical Marxist dream of a humanity liberated in a land of abundance’–which finds contemporary expression in manifestos for a technologically advanced ‘luxury communism’–must be sidelined for the foreseeable future: ‘those elements of the climate movement and the left that pretend that none of these needs to happen, that there will be no sacrifices or discomforts for ordinary people, are not being honest.’

Lenin of course was that rarest of polemicists: one who got the opportunity to follow through on his words. And follow them through he did, not without brutality. Malm acknowledges the cruelties of ‘actually existing’ war communism: the authoritarianism, the food requisitions at gunpoint, the militarisation of labour, the summary executions to enforce discipline in the ranks. The experience ‘of civil war ‘deposited a poison of brutalised power in the heart of the workers’ state, to which it eventually fell victim’. Freedom of expression and assembly must be sacrosanct, however dire the emergency.

But planning allowed resourcefulness. At the start of the conflict the White and allied forces held 99 per cent of the coal and 97 per cent of the oil resources that had powered the pre-war Russian state. Surrounded on all sides, and forced to live completely by their own means by an import blockade, the Soviets marshalled the resources they did have effectively, constructing a functioning ‘biofueled workers’ state’ using the boreal forests that blanketed the Russia that remained to them for construction, heat and energy. And despite having to fell so much timber, they were conscious of the need to preserve, setting half of the forests aside as inviolable ‘monuments of nature’. That legacy persists: Russia still has more pure wildernesses than other nation.

Like Lenin’s essays, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency is in the best tradition of the polemic: the anger controlled, the urgency palpable, the imagery vivid, the case emphatically made, agree with it or not. And like Lenin, Malm is writing at a time of emergency. The critical difference, of course, is that Lenin wrote in the knowledge that a revolutionary vanguard was close to power.

Today’s left, at least that section offering a transformative agenda, is nowhere near. For all the talk of Green New Deals, by and large progressives retain faith in the sufficiency of a gradualist path to climate mitigation, placing hope in renewables technology and market mechanisms: solar, wind and batteries, carbon pricing and capture. In his anger Malm does not acknowledge that there is a certain tough-mindedness in pragmatism too: we need to do what we can within the context of the current political and economic environment, with the imperfect tools it affords. That means pressing for more investment in clean energy, for carbon taxes, for market regulation, and perhaps even for nuclear power and some forms of geoengineering.

But as the crisis bites harder, governments will have to take some or all of the tougher measures Malm anticipates. And the right, not the left, might be positioned to use it. Nationalist authoritarianism of various degrees has already taken hold in several nations: China, Brazil, Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Russia, the United States, and to some extent the United Kingdom.

The pandemic has illustrated the public will accept harsh measures if the threat is close by. Malm: ‘No road map, no manifesto, no vision from the climate movement … ever sketched anything like the meteor storm of state interventions that hit the planet in March 2020, and yet we were always told that we were being unrealistic, unpragmatic, dreamers or alarmists. Never again should such lies be given a hearing.’

The challenge for the left would seem to be to ensure that it, not the authoritarian right, has the keys to the state when the eye of the storm arrives. That day seems some way off. Whomever holds power, and whatever one thinks of his analysis, Malm, echoing Lenin, is surely right about this: it is necessary to act now–‘this very evening, this very night’.

A Marxist Perspective on Sustainability: Brief Reflections on Ecological Sustainability and Social Inequality

By Raju J. Das

Karl Marx's concept of sustainability is connected to his concepts of metabolism and reproduction. While the first connection is well recognized in recent literature (famously in the work of Paul Burkett, John Bellamy Foster and many others)[2], the second connection is not. Moreover, sustainability is potentially connected to another crucial concept in Marx's thinking - that is, value of labour power (which is expressed as the wage that workers receive), although Marx fails to explicitly make that connection.

In this short paper, I connect sustainability to metabolism, reproduction, and value of labour power. I argue that sustainability (or a healthy environment) can be seen as an "ecological social wage" under capitalism and has to be fought for as a part of a larger fight against the various logics of capitalism, such as endless accumulation, and against the system as a whole. Therefore, ecological sustainability is fundamentally a class issue, one that concerns the working class of the world as a whole that is comprised of people with different gender, racial, and nationality backgrounds, and it is not to be narrowly seen as an ecological issue, separate from the needs and the movements of the working class.

What is sustainability?

To live and to satisfy our needs, we must enter into a metabolic relation with nature, as Marx says in chapter 7 of Capital Vol 1.[3] That is, on the basis of manual and mental labour, we must interact with nature from which we get raw materials and energy and in which we dump waste products. Nature, especially transformed nature, is a part of the means of production.

Seeing society as a temporal process, in Chapter 23 of Capital Vol 1 Marx referred to "simple reproduction" saying: "every social process of production is at the same time a process of reproduction", and "No society can go on producing, in other words, no society can reproduce, unless it constantly reconverts a part of its products into means of production…"[4]

Rubbing Marx's concept of metabolism with his concept of reproduction, one can say this: in producing the things that we need, we use up the means of production, including those that come, more or less, directly from nature, and these means of production must be replenished in terms of their quantity and quality. For example, if we cut trees and pollute air to produce wealth, a part of the produced wealth -- the combined product of labour and nature -- has to be utilized to replenish the trees and to clean the air. We have to reproduce elements of nature, constantly. Not doing so constitutes a threat to sustainability.

Marx talks about sustainability more directly in Capital Vol 3:

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 householders]'.[5]

We may conclude that not to do so is to live in an ecologically unsustainable world, a world where the physical environment is not in a state of good health.

Marx's concept of sustainability is quite consistent with that of the United Nations' Brundtland Commission, established in the 1980s to promote sustainable development globally, which views sustainable development as: "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" (Brundtland Commission, 1987).[6]

That capitalism has not achieved sustainability is clear from the fact that we are facing massive ecological problems, including global warming, deforestation, soil erosion, air pollution, resource depletion, etc. The question is why?

Causes of threat to sustainability

First, what is not the cause? The threat to sustainability under capitalism does not come from the fact that there are too many people on earth, nor from the fact that some erstwhile poor countries are consuming more things to live a slightly better life, nor indeed from human beings' productive activity as such (e.g. industrialization), although all these facts do involve increased extraction of resources from nature. It is rather the social form in which we live our lives and the attendant nature-dominating discursive framework that constitute the most important threat to sustainability.

The social form in which we live is not one that is just.[7] We live in an unjust world. So one may ask: what connection might injustice have to the threat to sustainability?

I see inequality as a form of injustice. And I see inequality not just as inequality in income and consumption but as class inequality. Class inequality refers to the inequality in the control over society's productive resources, including those that come directly from nature (farm land, water, minerals, etc.), and consequent class exploitation (appropriation of surplus product or surplus labour, by the class that controls the means of production from the class that does not).[8] We are talking here about inequality between those who control productive resources and their uses, and those who do not, and inequality between those who have the power to exploit others in production and outside production, and those who do not.

Lenin said: "As long as there is exploitation there cannot be equality."[9] More specifically, the capitalist or "the landowner cannot be the equal of the worker, or the hungry man the equal of the full man" (ibid.). Because of class inequality, what we receive from society (in terms of goods and services to meet our needs) is not quite in accordance with our abilities; nor is it according to the amount of work we perform (consider how much a bank CEO makes as opposed to an ordinary worker); nor indeed is it according to how much we need in order to satisfy all of our varying needs.

Class-based inequality as class-based injustice is the fundamental threat to sustainability. This requires an explanation.

Most of us have to rely on wage-work to survive because of our separation from the objective conditions of production, including nature (land, etc.). Marx called this primitive accumulation, and this is an on-going process. This separation, with respect to nature, is not a physical separation, for production in all forms of society requires unity - non-separation - of human beings with nature. The separation in question is social-political; it is in terms of class. That is: we have no control over the use of the objective conditions of production, including those that more or less directly come from nature, with which we are physically in contact in the realm of production. We do not decide how much resources are being extracted, in what manner and at what rate. We are a part of nature. We are in physical contact with nature. Yet, under capitalism, we hardly control the basis on which we interact with nature.

We live in a society which, as Marx says in Capital Vol 1, is based on endless accumulation of wealth in the form of money, as denoted by M-C-MΔ. This is a process whose aim is not to directly satisfy human needs but to make profit, on a continuous basis. And this process of endless accumulation, i.e.accumulation for the sake of accumulation, generally promotes consumption for the sake of consumption. Otherwise, how will the endless production of things find a market? And while the accumulation process tends to be endless, many of the natural resources used in production are finite. This means, among other things that there is a disjunction - a contradiction - between capital's time (turnover time) and nature's time. Endless accumulation can take two forms: it is based on increases in the output over a prolonged working-day (especially in a context where technological change has not quite occurred) or per hour (when productivity-enhancing technological change has occurred).[10] And this means intense extraction of resources from nature and expansion of wastes dumped in the natural environment.

Let us explore this disjunction, this contradiction. A capitalist is compelled to engage in endless accumulation by the logic of accumulation and is passionate about this (both logic and passion matter here), so he/she has to, and wants to, invest money today and get back the investment with a profit as soon as possible. However, nature's time, which is driven by nature's own bio-physical-chemical processes that are more or less autonomous of human activities, may not coincide with capital's time. If a seed is planted today, it may take months or years for it to become a mature tree to satisfy human needs. Impatient to make money endlessly and quickly, the capitalist system cannot give nature enough time to reproduce - replenish - itself.

The capitalist class relation seeks to convert nature into a form of capital. Letting a seed grow into a mature tree is a natural process that takes time. This is nature's time, which is, of course, different for different natural processes. But time - from capital's standpoint - is money, and this means that one has to, for example, pay interest on the capital sunk in the form of the tree that is slowly growing out of a seed. The longer the time the tree remains in its natural state, the more is the cost of capital (interest), potentially. Anything that is not a part of circulation of capital, of the M-C-M Δ process, of the money-making process, is literally a waste, an unproductive thing.

We live in a society where nature is bought and sold like other things. Once I buy a piece of forestland, I can do whatever I want to do with it. The fetishism of the commodity - the idea that things that we use inherently have a price-tag (that is, that they must be bought and sold, and for a profit, for them to satisfy our needs) - is most stark in the case of nature (as it is in case of labour power as a commodity):[11] a beach, a forest or a farmland as things appear to be ones which are inherently, by necessity, commodities, and increasingly so since the 1970s when the epoch of the post-war crisis in the advanced capitalist world began. To treat nature and its elements (land, oceans, forests), as commodities is a hallmark of the modern society we live in. This logic of commodification under capitalism counters the logic of sustainability.

We live in a society where there is a profound disjunction, a contradiction, between the global scale of capitalist accumulation, as it is governed by the globally-operating law of value or the law of competition, on the one hand, and the political framework, that is, the state-system on the other, which is nationally-based (in spite of the erosion of some of the powers of the state in certain contexts). This disjunction makes it difficult for humanity to coordinate and to plan the use of natural resources which occur geographically unevenly on the surface of the earth across countries in an effective manner.

This forces, for example, Japan as a territorially separate entity with no oil of its own, located on the earthquake-prone ring of fire, to invest in nuclear energy plants; the ecologically risky nature of nuclear plants is made riskier by their location in the ring of fire. Because of the same disjunction, or contradiction, the low-income countries, more or less deprived of technologies that the advanced countries enjoy, are having to subject the natural environment under their territorial jurisdictions to excessively high level of exploitation, in order to meet their very basic needs. The ability to sustainably reproduce nature is unequally distributed in a world which is subjected to a global logic of accumulation and which is divided by nation-states, some of which are richer and more powerful than others.

We live in a society where old value must be destroyed for new value to be produced, and this means war. In many cases, indeed, economies of advanced capitalist countries rely on the production of military weapons to keep their accumulation system going, and this often means artificially creating conditions for war, and often this war involves war between poor countries. Further, advanced capitalist countries compete with one another for monopolistic control over the politically and militarily weaker countries' markets and workforce as well as their natural resources.[12]

In short, we live in an imperialist world, and imperialism means war. And war means massive destruction of nature. It means pollution. That Agent Orange, a powerful chemical used by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War to eliminate forest cover for anti-imperialism fighters in North Vietnam, is widely known. As a more recent example, the western-capitalist war on Iraq created a massive amount of environmental pollution, producing birth defects and other health problems, as London's Guardian reported.[13] War also means that resources are invested in killing people, while these resources can be used to replenish elements of nature (clean up rivers, oceans, plant trees), to increase the role of public transportation to reduce environmental pollution, and to enhance people's access to the things they need such as healthcare, housing, food, etc.[14] Using resources on wars or on the preparation for wars, when resources can be used to meet basic needs of people and to create a sustainable ecological environment - this problem is most glaring in the global periphery.

We live in a society where, given the high rate of labour exploitation and a large reserve army of labour globally, millions of people are deprived of a decent income with which to afford things produced in environmentally friendly ways (e.g. organically produced food), which are initially expensive in part because of the small-scale nature of production. In parenthesis, and in a slight criticism of Marx and Vladimir I Lenin, I will say that mere separation of direct producers from land, either in primitive accumulation (as per Marx), or in a process of class differentiation under the impact of market (as per Lenin), may create a market for food but not necessarily a market for ecologically produced food.

We live in a society, where there is a long-term trend towards the decline in the rate of profit as investment in constant capital to variable capital increases (because labour, as the ultimate creator of capitalist wealth, is increasingly replaced by non-labour inputs in the production process). This is also a society where there is the problem of a constant possibility of overaccumulation of capital and commodities. This problem is partly caused by lack of planning of production and by competitively-driven technological dynamism resulting in production of more and more things every hour, which, of course, requires more intense extraction of resources from nature and greater generation of wastes.[15] Responding to the declining rate of profit and the problem of overaccumulation, there is a tendency to not only increase exploitation of labour but also to make profit from new forms of commodification and from the destruction of nature.[16]

Sustainable production can be a source of profit for some capitals (consider the production of cleaner technologies; wilderness as an ecotourist place), so there can be, within limits, sustainable development within capitalism. But there are strong limits to sustainability within capitalism, in terms of both the magnitude of sustainability and the temporal and spatial scale of sustainability (how long and over how large an area sustainability can occur). This is because of the social framework within which sustainable development is promoted. This is the framework of markets-in-every-thing, of endless accumulation, and of inequality and of exploitation of people.

Capitalism takes far too much out of labour compared to what it gives it, just as it takes far too much out of nature compared to what it puts into it. There are two metabolic rifts here, joined together in the same process of capitalist accumulation: an ecological metabolic rift and a labour metabolic rift.[17]

Sustainable development means a clean environment, an environment that is a source of mental/spiritual peace, a source of material things that satisfy our needs, and a place to dump what is absolutely a waste product. It means a society where farm production and non-farm production are sectorally and geographically integrated, to the extent materially possible, thus minimizing metabolic rift between where things directly derived from nature (e.g. food, linen) are produced (say, in villages) and where they are consumed.[18]

Our needs as human beings include environmental needs. Like other needs, environmental needs cannot be fully met under capitalism or can be met only in an alienating way that impoverishes nature and us.

A large part of what is called nature is land. Land is an important means of production, and a source of food, and it has been subjected to unsustainable use under capitalism. About the relation between capitalism and agriculture, Marx says that: "the capitalist system runs counter to a rational agriculture" and that "a rational agriculture is incompatible with the capitalist system (even if the latter promotes technical development in agriculture)".[19] Paraphrasing and slightly extending Marx, Lenin says in his Development of Capitalism in Russia: "That capitalism is incompatible with the rational organization of agriculture (as also of industry) has long been known".[20] One can generalize Marx's and Lenin's point and say that capitalism is incompatible with the rational organization of our metabolic interaction with nature. Capitalism violates the principle of humanization of nature and naturalization of human beings.

Let me quote someone who is not a Marxist, Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate in Economics: "The big challenges that capitalism now faces in the contemporary world includes issues of inequality (especially that of grinding poverty in a world of unprecedented prosperity) and of 'public goods' (that is, goods that people share together, such as the environment). The solution to these problems will almost certainly call for institutions that take us beyond the capitalist market economy." (Sen, 1999:267)[21].

So what is to be done?

Capitalism can be seen in terms of its logic, or logics, and as a system[22], that is, the totality of capitalist class relation as such. So the fight against capitalism has to be seen as a fight against both aspects of capitalism. In terms of the fight against the logics of capitalism (endless accumulation, commodification, etc.), sustainable environment must be seen as a human need. More specifically, and under capitalism, it must be seen as a part of the value of labour power itself (something Marx failed to do explicitly).

So sustainable development must be fought for as a part of the fight to improve living conditions. The fight for environmental needs must be a part of the fight for a better "social wage". We can call it an "ecological social wage" and we can extend the scope of the concept of ecological social wage to include the remunerative price not only for peasants' labour performed on their own or leased-in land[23] but also for the indigenous communities working on commonly (or state-owned) owned farm-land and forest areas.

Given that one reason for the unsustainable environment is privatization of nature, the fight for sustainability must be a fight for common property in nature: for our rivers, forests, clean air and land as forms of common property. The fight for a sustainable environment must be a part of the fight for 'nature-commons', and such a fight must be a part of the fight for treating all forms of use-values (natural and non-natural things including factories and banks) as commons, which will be subjected to democratic control by men and women and citizens of different racial, ethic and nationality backgrounds.

Fighting for a sustainable environment is therefore a class issue, in the broadest sense of the term. It is a working class issue, or, more correctly, an issue of the alliance of workers and peasants (or the alliance of workers and small-scale producers, including indigenous producers). The matter of sustainable development is a deeply class matter (even if it is not exclusively a class matter). However, the fight against the logics of the system to obtain improvements within the system of capitalism is limited because there are limits to what capital can grant as long as capital rules.

To conclude: fighting for sustainable environment must be a part of the fight against the capitalist system itself, which exploits people and which is ecologically degrading (and which promotes and/or reproduces undemocratic relations based in gender, race, ethnicity and nationality, in order to be able to super-exploit some sections and to weaken ordinary people's resistance against exploitation and ecological degradation by dividing them).

The fight for sustainable development must be a fight for a society beyond commodification, private ownership of means of production, avoidable inequalities, exploitation, and social oppression. Such a fight requires a revolutionary program, including the nationalization of all the major corporations, banks, large farms and privately owned forests and plantations, under the democratic control of working people with their different gender, racial, ethnic and nationality backgrounds. This would allow the rational reorganization of the world's economy and our relation to nature, to meet the environmental and social needs of the masses, not the capitalists' need for endless private profit.

This was originally published at Links international journal of socialist renewal.

Notes

[1] Das is an Associate Professor at York University, Toronto. His most recent book, published in 2017, is Marxist Class Theory for a skeptical world, Brill, Leiden. He is currently writing a book on Marx's Capital 1, entitled 'Marx, Capital, and Contemporary Capitalism: A Global Perspective', to be published by Taylor and Francis, London. He serves on the editorial board and on the manuscript collective of Science and Society: A Journal of Marxist Thought and Analysis.

[2] Burkett, P. 1999. Marx and Nature. St. Martin's Press, New York. Foster, J. 2000. Marx's ecology, Monthly review Press, New York. See also: O'Connor, J. (ed). 1994. Is capitalism sustainable?, Guilford Press, New York.

[3] Marx, K. 1977. Capital Volume 1, Vintage, New York.

[4] Marx, 1977: p.711.

[5] Marx, K. 1981. Capital Volume 3, Penguin, London, p. 911

[6] This is quoted in Redclift, M. 2005. 'Sustainable development (1987-2005): An oxymoron comes of age', Sustainable development, 13:4, 212-227

[7] There is a large amount of literature on Marxism and justice/injustice. For example, see: Callinicos, A. 2000. Equality, Polity press, London (chapter 3). Geras, N.1985: 'Controversy about Marx and Justice', New Left Review, 1/150; Geras, N. 1992. 'Bringing Marx to justice', New Left Review, 1/195; Nielson, K. 1986. 'Marx, Engels and Lenin on justice: The critique of the Gotha programme',Studies in Soviet Thought, 32:1, 23-63. Also, Heller, A. 1976. The theory of need in Marx, St. Martin's press, New York.

[8] Das, R. 2017. Marxist class theory for a skeptical world, Brill, Leiden.

[9] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/jul/11.htm

[10] On these two forms of accumulation, which are respectively called formal and real subsumptions of labour under capital, see Das, R. J. 2012. 'Forms of Subsumption of labour under capital, class struggle and uneven development', Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 44:2, 178-200. The implications of this duality of capitalist accumulation for nature require a detailed exploration.

[11] This is also true about labour power as well, which has a natural component in so far as our limbs and our energy - the parts of our body-mind complex -- are parts of nature itself.

[12] Henryk Grossman (1929) says: 'Competition among the capitalist powers first exploded in the struggles to control raw material resources because the chance of monopoly profits were greatest here…. Because raw materials are only found at specific points on the globe, capitalism is defined by a tendency to gain access to, and exert domination over, the sources of supply. This can only take the form of a division of the world' https://www.marxists.org/archive/grossman/1929/breakdown/ch03.htm

[13] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/aug/22/iraq-children-health-cost-war-induced-air-pollution-study-toxic-waste-birth-defects

[14] Note that when basic needs of small-scale producers (e.g. peasants) are not met, they try to extract more out of nature (subjecting their land to more intense exploitation that will otherwise be the case) in order to survive, and this in turn can result in an above-normal level of environmental degradation.

[15] I am abstracting from the connection between over-accumulation of capital and the issue of the decline in the rate of profit caused by the rising ratio of the constant part of total capital relative to its variable part.

[16] This is the case even if these strategies can ultimately cause a physically and biologically degraded environment and a physically and mentally unhealthy labour force, reduce labour productivity, and increase the cost of constant capital and decrease the rate of profit.

[17] Das, R. 2014. 'Low-Wage Capitalism, Social Difference, and Nature-Dependent Production: A Study of the Conditions of Workers in Shrimp Aquaculture', Human Geography: A New Radical Journal, Vol 7(1):17-34.

[18] It also means a society where waste produced during the metabolic exchange between nature and society in the sphere of production returns to production, such that waste becomes a non-waste, it becomes productive.

[19] Marx, K. 1981. Capital Volume 3, Penguin, London, pp 216.

[20] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1899/dcr8iv/iv8xi.htm

[21] Sen, A. 1999. Development as Freedom, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

[22] Magdoff, F. and Foster, J. 2010. 'What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism',Monthly Review, https://monthlyreview.org/2010/03/01/what-every-environmentalist-needs-to-know-about-capitalism/

[23] Here land refers to land as farmland, forests, and water, so land-based activities on the part of small-scale producers include farming, forest-based activities (e.g. collection of forest products), and fishing. Many indigenous communities are involved in not only farming but also collection of forest products (e.g. leaves, firewood, etc.).