The Revolutionary Socialist Network, Workers
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Existing imperial ideasWoody, 2020 (Gus. “Revolutionary Reflections: Moving towards an ecological Leninism” rs21. December 18, 2020. https://www.rs21.org.uk/2020/12/18/revolutionary-reflections-moving-towards-an-ecological-leninism/ ///MF) Perhaps the largest parallel between Lenin’s thinking and the needs of modern ecological Marxism left under-analysed by existing accounts is the theory of imperialism. Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism presents an account of the imperialist states which powerfully analysed the causes and contradictions of their death project – World War One. [27] Today, the analysis of modern imperialism should aim to do the same, to turn the guns of ecological imperialism into the faces of global fossil capitalism. Again, just as the form of the capitalist state has changed since 1917, so too has the emergence and form of imperialism. Imperialism as national acts of military expansion to secure resources has been joined by an array of techniques by which global capitalism secures its resource frontiers. In particular, the mechanisms by which international bodies like the World Bank and IMF reinforce and intensify core-periphery extraction have been studied extensively by Marxist geographers and ecologists. These insights need to be brought into the analyses of environmentalists and socialists alike. At the same time, Marxists and revolutionaries in the years since have had to grow our thinking in the face of imperialist projects. Just as Lenin pointed out how capitalism in the early 20th century could not be analysed without an account of finance capital and imperialism, any eco-socialism is intellectually bankrupt without an account of how global fossil capital and climate breakdown depends on resource imperialism. Marxists can draw on Jason Moore’s historical accounts of resource frontiers, [28] Nick Estes’ writings on settler colonialism, [29] Fanon, [30] Sivanandan [31] – the list could go on. These works make clear that we cannot account for the climate crisis without accounting for the colonial project of frontier expansion and extraction. With a century of anti-colonial struggle and thought inspired by Marxists, there is no excuse for modern eco-socialists not to centre and build on these experiences in their analysis of climate breakdown. As conflicts over certain resources, territories, and technologies emerge across the warming world, so too can we expect new forms of climate imperialism, which will pose challenges to an eco-socialist left. We see glimpses of this in demands to send European armies into the Amazon to prevent its burning, or in the increasingly complex geopolitics of Lithium mining for batteries and other renewable tech. Taking inspiration from Lenin and ensuring an account of modern imperialism is central to explaining environmental breakdown prevents socialists, particularly those in the Global North, falling for an imperialist environmentalism. Otherwise, ecological regimes could see themselves continuing extractive violence across the world. Such is the case with many accounts of the Green New Deal, which may talk of the exciting potential of batteries and electric transitions, but talk little of global empire’s continued extraction of rare earth minerals through violence and exploitation in the Global South. This may require engagement with the thorny questions of degrowth and climate debt, which far too many so-called eco-socialists reject with strawman arguments. Certainly, within the varied literature on degrowth there is some utopian hot air, but there is also attention to its links to decolonisation and anti-imperialism. Global eco-socialist solidarity will require massive programs of repair and restoration to the damage caused by core nations to the periphery. There is a space open to develop an ecological Leninist degrowth, which looks like a fundamental reorganisation of the production and extraction which fuels destruction in the core, towards the reversal of core-periphery metabolic flows. Such a politics opens up a space to link up revolutionaries in the core with those in the periphery, united in their commitment to ending the politics of national growth and its often-inevitable extractivism. Taking a lead from Martin Arboleda’s work on the political economy of mining, Planetary Mine, ecological Leninism should attempt to understand how the relations of global capitalism are determining the form and content of imperialism, and what our responses might be across the world. Through extensive analysis of the global mining supply chains and extraction on the ground in Chile, Arboleda is able to discuss the ways in which capitalist nations are interacting with each other, and how the theory of imperial powers which Lenin analysed must be updated to understand the different ways in which nations secure resource extraction. By expanding on work accounting for the effects and causes of contemporary imperialism like Planetary Mine and making it a core aspect of ecological Leninism, anti-imperialism can become a necessary feature of any transitional ecological Leninist regime. Download 2.09 Mb. Share with your friends:
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