Alex Roberts - The Rise of Ecofascism

Others have argued that it is essential to maintain a conception of climate systems breakdown beyond the radiative forcing effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. 8We agree. It is important for engaging the interrelated collection of problems that exist. But it is also politically essential: full decarbonization of the economy, absent adequate responses to the panoply of other ecological challenges, would not defuse the far right’s ability to use their ideas of a ‘crisis in nature’ for political gain or entirely rule out the threat of what has been called ‘ecofascism’.

But should we call it that?

‘Ecofascism’, as a term, has a rather complex history. Bernhard Forchtner, editor of The Far Right and the Environment , notes that ‘ecofascism’ is a much-contested term, not widely used in the academic literature. He characterizes it as a ‘fringe phenomenon’ that has little impact on the existing political landscape. 9We largely agree. Why, then, is our book titled as it is? There are two reasons. First, we are writing in anticipation of politics to come as much as reflecting on the politics of today. Second, we accept the anxiety about the future that presently goes under the name of ‘ecofascism’ as valid, even if it is not the most precise or useful term.

Let us look at some of the uses to which the term has been put. First, ‘ecofascism’ has been used as a smear by right-wing opponents of environmentalism. Perhaps most illustrative is James Delingpole’s The Little Green Book of Eco-Fascism , whose subtitle, ‘The Left’s Plan to Frighten Your Kids, Drive Up Energy Costs and Hike Your Taxes!’ says enough about its politics. ‘Fascism’ here is the generic bogeyman of government action. 10It goes without saying that we are not claiming any similarity between left-environmentalism and fascism. Similarly, in line with the overwhelming critical consensus, we identify ‘fascism’ as an ideology of the far right, not of the left. To borrow a line from Frank Uekötter, author of The Green and the Brown: A History of Conservation in Nazi Germany , ‘If you came upon this book hoping to be told that today’s environmentalists are actually Nazis in disguise, then I hope you paid for it before reaching this sentence.’ 11

A second use of ‘ecofascism’ has also been to criticize the Deep Ecology movement by proponents of ‘social ecology’, most significantly Murray Bookchin. 12In the 1980s, Bookchin used the term to describe increasingly misanthropic tendencies within Deep Ecology, a strain of environmentalism that ‘ascribed an equivalent value to human beings and nonhuman nature, and rejected the premise that people should occupy a privileged place in any moral reckoning’. 13Bookchin was responding to Earth First! co-founder David Foreman’s suggestion that US aid to Ethiopia during the famine was merely delaying the inevitable. Much better, he said, would be to ‘let nature seek its own balance’. 14Bookchin was also responding to an article from the pseudonymous ‘Miss Ann Thropy’, writing in the Earth First! Journal in support of the HIV virus. ‘If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring the human population back to ecological sanity’, wrote the pseudonymous author, ‘it would probably be something like AIDS’. 15

This tendency still exists within environmentalism, or at least appears to. Recently, it was summed up neatly by a single image from the early COVID-19 pandemic: ‘Corona is the cure, humans are the disease.’ This last example, however, is more complex: soon after its propagation, it was found to be the output of a decentralized far-right propaganda group called the Hundred Handers, who were attempting to destabilize and mock environmentalist movements. 16However, the most dangerous of all, Bookchin argued, were the new forms of ‘Malthusianism’ and overpopulation discourse. We discuss this tendency further in chapter 1.

Other people have also similarly been called ‘ecofascists’, perhaps most prominently some of the rioters at the storming of the US Capitol building on 6 January 2021. 17Here, the term refers to what has been more aptly called ‘conspirituality’, a mixture of ‘wellness’ beliefs, conspiracy theorizing and appeals to the natural world. 18We address this tendency further in chapter 3.

‘Ecofascism’ is also what the Christchurch mosque attacker called his ideology. He used it to justify murdering 51 Muslims. A few months later, the same justification was used in the killing of 23, largely Latino or Latina, people in El Paso. This book arrives in the long tail of these shootings and is in part an attempt to systematize and explore some of the complicated anxieties that emerged in the wake of these atrocities. 19

So how do we define ‘ecofascism’? We must first take a step back. What is ‘fascism’? Our definition attempts to synthesize the insights of the literature, hewing closely to the mid-twentieth-century historical phenomenon rather than trying to extract a trans-historical ideal type.

Fascism is a political form that seeks to revolutionize and reharmonize the nation state through expelling a radically separate ‘Other’ by paramilitary means. 20Because it seeks to legitimize itself through a self-declared intimate connection with a homogeneous ‘people’, it also requires a dense mass-associational society. 21This allows it to circumvent liberal democratic forms of legitimacy. Because its notion of the homogeneous people is totalizing, it seeks to recruit all of life, both in the sense of ‘private life’ and the ‘natural world’, into its project and thus develops a voluminous and highly normative nature politics. 22This vast nature politics is a consequence of the prior encroachment of capitalism into life, also in the senses of ‘private life’ and ‘the natural world’. Thus, fascism is intensely interested in the interface between humans and the natural world, and the ordering of social relations according to nature’s laws. However, because its account of capitalism is mystified and racialized, it does not consistently oppose capitalism’s incursions into life, but ascribes different aspects of this incursion different racial characters. Drawing from nature the bleak lessons of scarcity, competition and dominance, it affirms the ‘natural’ character of racial struggle and the superiority of its own race within it.

The dominance of a few white nations globally in the time of fascism’s appearance was a consequence of the globalized system of capitalism in its colonial form. Yet, at the same time, capitalist expansion destroyed the natural environment and destabilized social relations. One of the most pronounced tensions in fascist thought is, therefore, its ambivalence towards capitalism: it is the source of much that fascism finds appalling, and yet, as the real motor of the domination that fascism affirms, it cannot be entirely rejected. Fascism responds to this ambivalence with a normative racial vitalism: the dominance that capitalism affords is affirmed and naturalized while at the same time its destructiveness towards aspects of nature (and the social relations embedded in nature) is criticized. One effect of the colonial stage of capitalist development is affirmed, the other rejected. We will explore this contradictory response in greater depth in the following chapter.

Fascism in power made use of the authoritarian instruments that the state had accumulated during prior periods of crisis and colonial expansion. 23In doing so, it favoured the interests of the ruling classes. However, it also used these instruments to express its nature politics and attempt to live out nature’s diktats. The homogeneous notion of the people outlined above demands purification, both to destroy the organized working class and the nation’s supposed racial enemies. In its movement, party and state forms, fascism therefore tended towards violence.