Beyond Eurocentric Green Transitions
Towards an Agrarian Question of Anti-Imperialism
I am copying here a long book review that I started some years back of Max Ajl’s A People’s Green New Deal. As with too many pieces of writing, I did not get around to finishing it for the journal that had requested it, so I am posting it here in case it may be of interest or use.
Beyond Eurocentric Capitalist Green Transitions: Towards an Agrarian Question of Anti-Imperialism
The escalating world scale social-ecological contradictions of capitalism, which bourgeois social theorists seek to obfuscate under the banner of a “polycrisis,” have generated a rising chorus of demands for a transition to more ecologically sustainable and socially just modes of economic production. Calls for an equitable “green transition” in the Global North gained particular momentum in the conjunctural convergence of the financial crisis, which deepened the already wide chasm of wealth inequality, with the intensification of the climate crisis. Extra-parliamentary social movements, such as Occupy, combined with a renewal of social-democratic electoral forces gave the imperative of transition a broader and more popular hearing. At the same time, however, this was a conjuncture marked by an evident decline in the antiwar and anti-imperialist orientation that had, in response to capitalist globalization and the war on terror, been prominent in left movements of the 1990s and 2000s. While the demobilization of anti-war and anti-imperialist movements was set in motion by the election of Barack Obama, it became most evident in the absence of any popular opposition in the 2010s to ongoing Western military interventions in West Asia and North Africa, a marked contrast to the response to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. As a consequence, the contemporary conjuncture in the Global North is one in which the opening of legitimate political space for demands of green transition has corresponded with, and even risked being premised upon, the closing of political space for anti-imperialism.
The implications of this correspondence between emergent debates on green transition and the decline of anti-imperialism are uncovered and called to account by Max Ajl in his book A People’s Green New Deal. The book is not simply concerned that green transition debates have hitherto insufficiently integrated anti-imperialism, a position that could be ostensibly rectified by an additive prescription of sprinkling anti-imperialism on top of existing approaches. Rather, Ajl’s point of departure is that green transition debates in the Global North have been fundamentally shaped and directed by a premise which precludes anti-imperialist analysis, and thereby they have operated within the boundaries of a “green imperialism” that can only go so far as securing transition in the North - whether conservative, liberal, or social democratic - by intensifying the externalization of social and ecological costs on to workers, semi-proletarians, and peasants in the Global South. Building on anti-colonial theory and the ecological marxist tradition, Ajl’s theoretical framework of “environmentally unequal exchange” further clarifies how such a premise of cost externalization cannot, in fact, address the ecological crisis on the planetary scale at which it operates. While it can provide the illusion of transition in the North - in the form of reduced national carbon emissions, renewable energy systems, more efficient technologies of production etc - the externalization of costs on to the ecologies and popular classes of the South will necessarily be incapable of substantively arresting and reversing the planetary ecological crisis in all its life threatening dimensions.
Demonstrating how existing green transition approaches and debates remain bounded by the very framework of capitalist imperialism that generates ecological crises on a planetary scale is already in itself an important and sufficient intervention to have made. The real strength of Aj’s book, however, is in its move beyond critique to demonstrating how approaches to the green new deal in the North can over come the divergence that marks our contemporary conjuncture - how, in other words, the green new deal framework can connect with anti-imperialism. Here, Ajl makes perhaps his most distinct intervention into the green transition debates, as he brings to bear upon them the long standing tradition of anti-imperialism as articulated from the peripheries and semi-peripheries of the capitalist world-system. Specifically, Ajl introduces into the green transition debates the imperative of joining together the national and agrarian questions - or what Moyo, Jha, and Yeros (2011) have referred to as the “agrarian question of national liberation” - in order to advance a revolutionary program that can both overcome unequal environmental exchange and open the road to overturning the system of capitalist imperialism from which it arises. In constructing a “people’s green new deal” that would advance an “agrarian question of national liberation” for the peripheries of the world-system, Ajl foregrounds the imperatives of sovereignty over resources for the South and colonized peoples in the North, reparations for colonialism and imperialism, the defeat of US imperialism, and revolutionizing agrarian relations across North and South. Beginning from a premise in which the North does not have access to what Samir Amin (2010) has called the “imperialist rent,” approaches to green transition will be forced to articulate a more just internationalist program that requires convergence in resource use and consumption across North and South.
The book is divided into two parts. Part One, encompassing the first four chapters, is titled “Capitalist Green Transitions,” and puts forward a critical engagement with existing debates and approaches to “transition” and GNDs in the Global North. As the title suggests, the operating assumption in Part One is that, whatever their disagreements, existing approaches to the GND in the Global North - whether right wing, liberal, or social democratic - have been premised upon a systematic discounting of the significance of the Global South to both the logic and history of capitalist development in the Global North. Ajl’s critique is not simply a catalogue of omissions; rather, he clearly demonstrates in Part One that this systematic discounting of the world-scale undersides of capitalist green transitions can go no further than proposing Eurocentric reformisms that apply a gloss of clean environmentalism upon a Global North protected from the degradations imposed upon the Global South.
The book’s materialist method of approach becomes evident in Chapter One, where Ajl begins by problematizing assumptions that green transition debates can be apprehended in a free floating marketplace of ideas. The emphasis is instead placed upon illuminating the analytical and political signficance of the material grounds from which green transition debates have arisen and been shaped. The Eurocentric reformisms constraining the GND debates are not, in other words, solely the outcome of bad ideas, but rather have been fundamentally shaped by the very underlying class interests and structural forces which have generated ecological crises on a planetary scale. The opening chapter places emphasis, in particular, on how capital is experiencing rising social and ecological contradictions as potentially existential threats to its structuring accumulation imperatives. The climate crisis has emerged and intensified in a conjuncture in which capital has been unable to overcome recurrent crises of overaccumulation and find sufficient profitable outlets for re-investment, leading to a mass of capital being recycled in socially unuseful financial speculation. As the climate crisis makes evident the imperative of large scale green infrastructural development, the existence of a large pool of capital resistant to being deployed in the real economy has the potential to instigate social forces that fundamentally question the ongoing usefulness of the capitalist class. Ajl argues that capital is thus compelled to ideologically re-present rising socio-ecological contradictions as external to its own logic and history, thereby opening space for their resolution to be achieved under the directive power of capital. In re-framing the climate crisis in this way, capital is able to generate conditions for both the renewal of accumulation and its own ideological re-legitimation.
Capital’s ideological re-framing of rising socio-ecological crises proceeds through three main strategies: the discourse of emergency, malthusianism, and techno-centric solutions. In the first instance, in so far as organized climate activism sidesteps analysis of underlying class forces it will not be able to recognize where and how Western monopoly capitalism is seizing hold of the language of “climate emergency” in order to “preserve existing distributions of wealth.” Under the cover of emergency, the ideologues of Western monopoly capitalism are able to foreclose serious consideration of those structural transformations that would threaten its own reproduction, namely here climate reparations, sovereign Southern development, and agroecology. This was most clearly seen, Ajl argues, in the way in which the language of “climate emergency” was mobilized in service of the Western backed coup against the Indigenous MAS government in Bolivia. The MAS government had been at the forefront of demands for climate reparations and for asserting greater Southern sovereign control over resources. By charging MAS with intensifying the “climate emergency” through its sovereign development projects, ideologues of Western monopoly capitalism were able to mobilize left environmental forces in the core to de-legitimize MAS and thus set the stage for its overthrow. Such de-legitimation reinforces long standing racialized tropes regarding the incapacity of non-Western peoples to exercise rational sovereign stewardship over their resources, and, in so doing, protects the mass of privately held Northern capital from being redistributed in service of a just international green transition. This ideological inversion of the ecological crisis, locating its causes in the irrationality of Southern sovereignty and its solution in Northern capital, is further buttressed, Ajl demonstrates, by the re-emergence of Malthusian discourses emphasizing human population growth, particularly in the South, as the primary threat to ecological sustainaibility. In so far as they succeed in setting the terms of debate, the language of emergency and Malthusianism re-orients green transition frameworks towards techno-centric solutions whose primary concern is generating conditions for a new round of accumulation for the capitalist class.
If green transition debates proceed through an ideological framework premised on the material interests of the capitalist class, thereby foreclosing climate reparations and undermining Southern sovereignty, they will be necessarily centered on the imperative of “incentivizing,” rather than redistributing, privately held capital to re-orient its investments towards sustainable practices. Within such a framework, the practical feasibility of the green transition rests, in other words, upon unlocking trillions of dollars with the key of the profit motive that alone can mobilize finance capital. These constraining material interests function, then, to shepherd green financing frameworks along paths which renew a calculus long essential to capital accumulation: the socialization of risk and the privatization of profit. Such renewal is presented as a win-win by advocates of “capitalist green transitions,” as it promises a “new round of accumulation” while delivering the necessary infrastructure and technological improvements that public bodies pursuing green transition are incapable of effecting on their own. For Ajl, however, such a formula of “socializing risk in order to lay ground for a new round of accumulation,” while capable of unlocking private finance towards green transition, can only do so on terms that intensify existing maldistributions of wealth and further externalize the costs of transition on to the oppressed classes and peripheries of the capitalist world system. A key illustrative example provided here consists of the UN Climate Finance Leadership Initiative (CLFI), which aims to entice an otherwise hesitant private finance by generating new “green” asset classes, such as carbon, capture, and storage (CCS) that can provide profitable outlets for over-accumulated capital while ostensibly mitigating the climate crisis. Key to the feasability of such a commodification and financialization of nature strategy, Ajl demonstrates, is the consolidation of a “de-risking” framework that can provide assurance that green asset classes can generate consistent returns for institutional investors. In a context in which the supposed “unused” lands of Global South states are disproportionately targeted for CCS investments, de-risking as called for by the CLFI involves state backed revenue guarantees, de-regulation in the Global South, and reducing avenues for Indigenous litigation against investments which might violate their sovereign rights. In so far as the capitalist framework for mobilizing green finance thus necessarily externalizes the “socialization” of the costs of green asset classes on to the Global South, Ajl concludes that “new green financing mechanisms rest on the northern capitalist enclosure and evaporation of sovereignty, resubmitting the South to colonization through financial chicanery, in turn relying on a legacy of colonial and neo-colonial underdevelopment.”
While capitalist green transition projects are largely silent on the role of agriculture, Ajl uncovers how land, both materially and conceptually, is central to the generation of green assets. This is clearly seen in how CCS requires large expanses of land afforestation across the Global South to serve as carbon absorption sites that can potentially mitigate the excessive carbon emissions of the Global North. In foregrounding the materiality of land use to capitalist green transition, Ajl reveals the false premises of capital’s techno-utopian promise that the “imperial mode of living” can continue undisturbed on the basis of swapping out carbon emitting with carbon neutral or carbon absorbing technologies. Rather, both the profits and carbon absorption to be achieved by new green asset classes such as CCS are contingent on the renewal of colonial society-nature dualisms which assume that the lands of the Global South are either uninhabited or are threatened by the destructive activities of local peoples. Such lands should thus be protected from local peoples by being converted into green carbon absorbing assets owned by large scale institutional investors. For Ajl, evidence of the colonial land use underpinning capitalist green transitions can be found in the growing embrace of “hand of god fantasies about half-earth…imagining half of “Nature” immured from hordes of polluting souls…through wide-scale conversion of human-inhabited areas to C02 -drawdown farms and fortress conservation.” Preserving half the earth as afforested land will require the more intensive use of the other half via the further industrialization of agriculture and the expansion of biofuel production. Both “halves” of the earth necessary for the capitalist green transition can only be realized, Ajl warns, via the denial of sovereignty to the peoples inhabiting the targeted lands of the Global South. The “preserved” or “restored” Nature half of the Earth can only be achieved through denying the sovereign right of peoples to exercise integrated social-ecological management of landscapes, and the intensely cultivated half risks re-orienting land use away from local needs in favor of export to the Global North.
The enforcement of this denial of sovereignty, along with the policing and containment of South-North population movements that will inevitably accompany the intensification of global inequalities via capitalist green transitions, necessitates the projection of US and NATO military power into the Global South. Thus, not only is the US military a primary source of carbon emissions, its overwhelming dominance over the means of violence is central to backstopping green transitions that intensify North-South inequalities. In recalling the centrality of US military power to the character of green transition, Ajl here makes a distinct and vital intervention into green transition debates: there can be no just internationalist “program even possible within a policy that insists on preserving the Pentagon and NATO.” It is disconcerting, in the least, that green transition debates in the imperial core have hitherto been unconcerned with integrating opposition to, and reparations for, endless US and NATO military interventions into their programs for a more sustainable world.
In the second chapter of PGND, Ajl trains his critique more specifically upon eco-modernism, as it consitutes the component of the capitalist program for green transition that has appealed most seriously to those looking to construct “left,” and even socialist/communist, green transitions. Of course, those on the left currently embracing eco-modernism do so on the premise that such a strategy is not the exclusive property of capital, and can indeed be deployed as part of a socialist green transition waged against the directive power of capital. Ajl’s concern in this chapter is that left “eco-modernism” runs the risk of obscuring how such a program can only contain the power of capital in so far as it embraces, even if implicitly, the renewal of imperialism as a necessary premise for class compromise in the core.
Eco-modernism is defined here as an approach premised upon the belief that increasing technological progress and diffusion will, in and of itself, ultimately mitigate and resolve ecological crises. Such an approach has evident appeal to the capitalist class for the reason that it re-orients ecological politics away from forms of class struggle and anti-imperialism that center resource redistribution as a necessary component of green transition. In foreclosing the urgency of distributional questions, eco-modernism effectively contains green transition to “questions of waiting for technological advance” that further promise that the “imperial mode of living” can continue unchanged so long as nonrenewable carbon emitting infrastructure is swapped out for renewable carbon neutral technology. For Ajl, such an orientation is underwritten by an intensification of capitalism’s underlying society-nature binary. Here, the faith that society can remain unchanged, via a technological substitution that reduces its impact on the earth, is dependent upon the realization of a progressive “de-coupling” of social reproduction from earthly material processes. The ideal of a dematerialized global economy can only be rendered credible, however, by obscuring the very material processes upon which green technologies will continue to depend. Specifically, the minerals necessary for a range of renewables technologies are primarily located in the Global South, and thus the eco-modernist program, in so far as it does not call for reductions in consumption levels in the Global North, will necessarily be premised upon the reproduction of the denial of sovereignty to the South that has been historically consitutive of capitalist imperialism.
The emphasis on the limits of eco-modernist techno-utopian approaches to green transition continues in Chapter three, where Ajl further develops his critique through an engagement with debates on “energy transition” and “degrowth” vs “green growth.” Compelling evidence is provided in this chapter regarding the need for a rapid, planned downshift in levels of energy use for the core so as to preserve remaining atmospheric space for Southern development. However, on its own such a rapid reduction would not be sufficient for the realization of a globally just green transition, with Ajl arguing that even if all emissions were to stop today that “people in the South would continue living in the climate of injustice forged by historical C02 emissions.” In light of such a “climate debt” owed from North to South, Ajl combines the call for rapid reduction in energy use in the core with a call for climate reparations that can provision Global South states with the necessary capital and technology to develop more sustainably than has been the case in the Global North. Against those who question the politically feasibility of a global leveling of resource use, Ajl centers political struggle as foundational to the feasibility of green transitions. The call here, in other words, is for a rejection of technocratic anti-politics and a centering instead of the imperative of seizing political and economic power from capitalists so as to impose the necessary anti-imperialist eco-socialist, rather than profit-oriented, logic upon the productive forces.
Part one concludes, in chapter four, with a deeper focus on how left forces in the core have engaged the imperative of political struggle which Ajl identifies as foundational to green transition. Here, Ajl argues that left forces in the core have remained bound to a social democratic politics which struggles for a green new deal that can deliver benefits to the working classes without overturning the political power of capital. There are two major limitations, according to Ajl, that render green social democracy unfeasible. First, historically social democracy has been premised upon the existence of a strong communist bloc that social democratic forces in the core could build from in holding capital to account. Today, the absence of such an anti-systemic bloc in world politics makes the achievement of social democracy difficult, if not impossible. Second, even if it were possible to achieve green social democracy in the core, the benefits arising from such a class compromise will remain premised upon imperialism, which, Ajl argues, social democratic advocates thus must remain silent upon or participate in securing. This latter concern is demonstrated by highlighting how even the more radical thinkers of green social democracy in the core have often joined with US imperialism in vilifying as “authoritarian” or “petro-populist” leading anti-imperialist states of the Global South, such as Bolivia and Venezuela. In so doing, such “left” green social democrats effectively undermine sovereign Southern projects that can most effectively re-secure sovereign power over mineral resources and retain more value from mineral extraction. By contrast, as we will now see, Ajl takes, for his own proposed “peoples green new deal,” the political struggle advanced by anti-systemic states and movements in the South as point of departure. It is only in doing so that programs for green transition in the core can connect integrally with anti-imperialism.
The critique of existing green transition programs in the core in Part One gives way, then, to the more propositional approach developed in Part Two of the book. Against the constitutive conditions of “capitalist green transitions” established in Part One - technocratic anti-politics, imperialism, climate finance, and the society/nature dualism - Ajl foregrounds political struggle, eco-socialist planning, sovereignty, reparations, agro-ecology and integrated landscape management as the necessary premises of what he terms a “people’s green new deal” in Part Two. To understand this proposed framework requires that we follow Ajl in inverting the spatial and temporal orderings of capitalist imperialism: that we begin at the end, and that we center the peripheries.