The Rise of Ecofascism. Alex Roberts

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Название The Rise of Ecofascism
Автор произведения Alex Roberts
Жанр Афоризмы и цитаты
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Издательство Афоризмы и цитаты
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781509545391



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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’,2 we 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.

      Now, the overarching form of environmental crisis is anthropogenic climate systems breakdown. Chapters 24 turn 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’.3 Climate systems breakdown puts the structure of capitalism at risk and thus also the social order that the far right is committed to defend.

      Faced with a crisis of such magnitude, the far right has diversified its nature politics once again, splintering into parts more or less accepting of the problem, more or less mystified, more or less ambivalent about the possible end of industrial modernity. There is no single far-right nature politics at the moment. Just as they have been throughout history, different actors are divided up by different ways of looking at the problem, various conceptions of what is and is not included in ‘nature’, profound disagreements about what the problem actually is, massive discrepancies in tactics, and conflict about long-term solutions to climate breakdown.

      The effects of climate systems breakdown are already widespread. But like any exponential process without end, it is almost all in the future. It is to this future that the final chapter of the book turns. Here, we address what we call the ‘ecofascist hypothesis’: the widespread anxiety that our political future might be ‘ecofascism’. How are we to make sense of such a prediction?

      If it scales up beyond this movement stage to become a form of government, this future ‘ecofascism’ will have to address the more pronounced tension that has animated all forms of far-right ecologism to date: the tension between capitalism’s endless economic expansion and the affirmation and protection of the ‘natural order’. We outline two possible futures. In each, the far right serves as the (perhaps unruly) tool of a large fraction of capital. First, fossil capital, which allows the far right to continue its current broad commitments to climate change denial (we call it ‘Fossilized Reaction’). Secondly, it adheres to the interests of the security state and authoritarian capitalist interests more generally (we call this possible future ‘Batteries, Bombs and Borders’), which are involved in the geopolitically fraught process of securing the resources for a green energy transition and securing hegemony in a renewed era of superpower competition. Complicating both of these is the possible arrival of far-right groups of ‘climate collapse cults’.

      Few books on the environment model transformations in politics as drastic as those outlined here. There are exceptions, notably Climate Leviathan. In it, Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright outline four hypothetical transformations of politics.6 Most similar to our outline of future ‘ecofascism’ is their ‘Climate Behemoth’, in which reactionary political actors oppose the globalization of politics but keep capitalism. Many parts of our accounts are similar, although we split it into two distinct parts. The second of these parts even has some similarities with their ‘Climate Leviathan’, which seeks planetary capitalist government. In our