Alex Roberts - The Rise of Ecofascism

Happy acknowledgements pages are all alike; every unhappy acknowledgements page is unhappy in its own way. It is therefore a pleasure to report the perfect blandness of what follows.

We would like to thank our editor Dr George Owers and our three anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful and generous feedback on the first draft of this book. We are indebted to Ian Tuttle for his speedy and exacting copyediting, as we are to Julia Davies at Polity for her assistance throughout the process. We would also like to thank the rest of the team at Polity for putting together this book.

We would like to thank the guests who appeared on our podcast, 12 Rules for WHAT, during the writing of this book. Particular thanks, for their insights into the topics discussed here, are due to Andreas Malm, Lise Benoist, Samir Gandesha, Annie Kelly, Peter Staudenmaier, Joshua Citarella, Matthew Remski, David Renton, Mark Bray, Shane Burley, Blair Taylor, Jessica Thorne, Channel Rescue, James Poulter, Emerican Johnson, Spencer Sunshine, Alexandra Stern, Elif Sarican, Nik Matheou, Daniel Sonabend, as well as those many comrades who have elected to remain anonymous. We would also like to thank Adrienne Buller for her feedback on our conclusion.

I (Alex) would like to thank my family and Sam for his infinite patience in writing this book with me.

I (Sam) would like to thank Alex, Andrew and Cameron, my sharpest interlocutors. I would also like to thank my family for their emotional support during the writing of this book, their feedback on the manuscript, and for making me who I am in the first place, although I’m not sure anyone else thinks that was such a good idea. And to Amelia, thank you for everything.

On 13 January 2020, we first put pen to paper for this book. Our argument felt clear and horrifying: as climate systems broke down, the centre of political normalcy would collapse, and people would find themselves looking for more drastic solutions. The escalating climate crisis would provide opportunities to all parts of the far right. Seductive neo-Malthusian arguments about overpopulation would bolster hardline security policies and borders, and give seemingly compelling justification for the radical deepening of racist politics in the Global North. The cultural tropes of uncleanliness, pollution and pestilence, which for centuries dictated the hierarchy of different people’s places within, and access to, nature, would become more potent as people once again encountered the natural world as their antagonist. The interests of capital would swing behind authoritarian governments as a means to protect profits and growth. While we disagreed with some who had said that ‘ecofascism’ would be a direct and unavoidable consequence of climate breakdown, we thought such a project couldn’t entirely be ruled out.

On the day we began to write, 41 people were in a serious condition in a hospital in Wuhan, China, their lungs filled with a strange form of pneumonia, caused by a virus which did not yet have a name. In a matter of months, what came to be known as COVID-19 spread across the world, and some of the social stressors we had envisaged occurring with the onset of serious catastrophic climate breakdown arrived a decade or three early.

Much of the response to the pandemic avoided talk of the climate crisis directly. This is perhaps because the diverse ecological problems facing us have sometimes been simplified into the correlation of two measures: the parts per million of atmospheric carbon dioxide and the rise in global average temperatures. Such a simplification cannot account for the increasing risk of pandemics, among a host of other events. COVID-19 wasn’t caused by a rise in CO 2levels, but it was arguably a product of the transformative effects modern capitalist societies have had on the environment. 1It was perhaps the moment at which we should have collectively and decisively moved in our understanding – and not just in our terminology – from ‘global warming’ to ‘climate systems breakdown’.

The pandemic provided a glimpse into possible political responses to future climate breakdown. Past responses to climate crises such as extreme weather events had been shot through with environmental racism and state violence, but the scale of total social transformation implied by the word ‘fascism’ would have been hyperbole. Long imagined in disaster-movie style as a series of blazing hot summers and polar bears adrift, all punctuated by the occasional cataclysmic wave, it suddenly seemed to us that climate systems breakdown might actually look much more like the pandemic did: mass death events, sudden stresses on global supply chains, abrupt and previously unthinkable changes to everyday life, massive discrepancies in vulnerability across class and racial groups, a generally increased anxiety, racially displaced blame, the tightening of surveillance regimes, a sudden return to governments acting exclusively and aggressively in their national and class interest, the mainstreaming of conspiracy culture, talk of the end of globalization, a retreat to protectionism, unprecedented measures that suddenly seem entirely necessary, the sudden collapse of livelihoods for billions of the world’s poor, and a deep economic shock worldwide.

This book is not about the coronavirus pandemic, and we should not expect the politics that emerges in response to major climate events in the future to resemble it exactly. Climate change contains other kinds of crises: extreme weather events, migration crises, chronic and acute food and water shortages, climate-related conflicts and the like. Each crisis will be encountered differently, each response will be, as the governance of crisis always is, complex and multifaceted, and often suddenly amplificatory of dormant social forms. It is in these unpredictable consequences of complex crises that the threat of the far right lies.

Mass far-right environmentalism will not be born from a vacuum. It would draw on the history of reactionary nature politics, which we call ‘far-right ecologism’. In the first part of this book, we trace the history of these ideas and practices, from colonial nature management to the rise of scientific racism and eugenics to the ‘green’ aspects of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany through to the postwar overpopulation discourse, currents of environmentalist misanthropy, and lastly the securitization of the environment itself. It is tempting to lump all historical manifestations of far-right environmentalism together. But this would be wrong. Although Umberto Eco noted that fascists are prone to understanding their own politics as a ‘singular truth, endlessly reinterpreted’, 2we should resist this tendency. The history we cover is episodic and disparate, although consistent patterns do emerge. Time and again we see ‘far-right ecologism’ as animated by the profound tension between capitalism’s expansionist dynamic, which often entails the destruction of parts of nature, and its continual production of social transformation. It is a history, therefore, not just of far-right ecologism’s ideas but also of capitalism’s nature–culture interface and its attendant crises.

And what this history shows is that far-right ecologism has been, by and large, intellectually parochial, concerned with nature in a curtailed and limited form. Its sense of nature has been flattened by fixation on particular species or a single place. If they have, like the environmentalist maxim, often ‘acted local’, they have rarely ‘thought global’. Nevertheless, such intellectual parochialism should not be underestimated: it has been capable, at times, of genocide.

Now, the overarching form of environmental crisis is anthropogenic climate systems breakdown. Chapters 2– 4turn to the various far-right responses to this crisis. Climate systems breakdown is no local problem, nor can it be resolved by force. The consequences of failure cannot easily be made to affect a particular othered group. It will not be solved by anything the far right has historically proposed. But nor is it irrelevant to far-right politics. Far-right politics has, since its inception, been intimately involved in the defence of capitalism, and the most important cause of climate systems breakdown – the continued extraction and use of fossil fuels – is, in the words of Andreas Malm, ‘not a sideshow to bourgeois democracy … it is the material form of contemporary capitalism’. 3Climate systems breakdown puts the structure of capitalism at risk and thus also the social order that the far right is committed to defend.