Theories of Political Ecology: Monopoly Capital Against People and the Planet

Introduction

Political ecology emerged as a field of study in the 1970s in reaction to dominant political science, Marxism’s lack of focus on the impact of ecological damage on working-class health and well-being, and widespread environmental determinism. ¹ The discipline is generally understood as concerned with understanding ecology from the perspective of political economy, or the science of uncovering the laws linked to production and consumption in human society. In the 1980s, new currents of Marxism emerged, fusing value theory and focus on the environment, with reconstruction of ecological thinking in the Marxist canon (Foster, 1999; Mies & Shiva, 1993; O’Connor, 1988). This article reviews and critiques a selection of strands of social-ecological theory prominent in the core. It is not a reconstructive survey or genealogy. It focuses on extractivism and the post-development school, degrowth, “fossil capitalist” Marxist approaches, and ecologically unequal exchange (EUE).

These theories have distinct taproots, reflecting the periodization of their emergence and the cycles of struggles and “ecological crisis,” or the under-reproduction of the non-human ecology in a way which damages working-class well-being or the conditions of capitalist accumulation, against which they emerged (Leonardi & Torre, 2022). ² The new debate uniquely emerges amidst shifts within the earth system which threaten to make it unhospitable to human life. ³ Accordingly, there are political elements behind the emerging debate which must orient a critique of it, attentive to how these theories may be recuperated by monopoly capital, or seek rupture with it via national liberation and revolution.

First, it is increasingly recognized within ruling-class institutions (World Economic Forum, 2020) that the waste element of accumulation threatens to undermine the natural conditions needed for the reproduction of capital. Second, such institutions worry over Northern ability to control population flows, needed to preserve polarized accumulation, which rests on modulated mobility of labor from the periphery to core. Third, despite the partial rollback of the national liberation movement (Abdel-Malek, 1985) many forces and processes continue to contest the future of the world system and shift to multipolarity, including partially industrialized semi-peripheries, such as Brazil and South Africa, theoretically subject to capture by radical forces; decreased ability of monopoly capital to dictate military outcomes, especially in the Arab region where anticolonial or antisystemic militia have been engaged in direct military confrontation with Western proxy forces; near-permanent insurrection (Yeros, 2021); the presence of newly radicalized states, such as Venezuela and Zimbabwe, which harbor or incarnate antisystemic struggles; and the rise of China, whose nature cuts in and out of the contemporary ecological debate.

The theory of EUE frames the critique. EUE emerged in the mid-1980s as a “biophysical” revision of Marxism, noting that throughout history, certain regions of the world economy were exporting material throughput while remaining underdeveloped. Such work has focused on the physical exchanges embodied in international trade. It has established the non-neutrality of technology not merely with respect to facilitating international value flows, but from the uneven impacts of ecological crisis. It has been an important empirical addition to work on unequal exchange in international trade (Emmanuel, 1972), highlighting the North–South contradiction at the heart of global accumulation and the ecological crisis (The Cocoyoc Declaration, 1975). This article deploys and reconstitutes the findings of EUE to show how uneven accumulation impacts core and periphery differently. It furthermore shows the limits of EUE as a unified theory of imperialism. It reworks EUE to show how the under-reproduction of peripheral or global natures has sharp impacts on peripheral semi-proletariat and peasant sectors. It shows how this often involves the expropriation of previous commons, including the atmosphere, by colonial or imperial states, or by neocolonial intermediaries. Correspondingly, this article shows the centrality of peripheral marginalized/semi-proletariat forces in resisting monopoly capital and achieving social control over the human-ecology metabolism.

The article furthermore argues that many of the prominent new theories tend to follow two paths. One follows an old path of focusing on the agency of a nationally-constituted Northern working class or foregoes class analysis all together, justifying national-chauvinist Northern ecological politics, blind to polarization and permanent primitive accumulation. The other displaces the debate over political paths to the future from North to South, but in fragmentary ways which reject national projects. Accordingly, these theories, whether as outcomes of their methodologies or as explicit political programs, construct political agents/subjects walled off from the major contemporary struggles in the weak links of global capitalism. Fossil capitalism is mistaken in its reliance on a false theory of linear proletarianization and strategic calls for internationalism without accounting for the different paths to popular ecological development; and eco-modernism (alongside fossil capitalist thinking) has argued for the categorical technological neutrality of technology. In this way, they are blind to EUE and its relationship to technological development and polarized accumulation more broadly. While “extractivism” has a peripheral genealogy, it does not adequately contend with EUE and lacks any serious theory of development, when it does not reject the category entirely.

The essay proceeds in the following manner. The first section deals with four prominent theories of political ecology: fossil capitalism and eco-modernism, extractivism, and degrowth. It, then, examines EUE. It proceeds to an immanent critique of EUE, showing how its empirical findings can be placed on sounder footing in regard to value theory. It links EUE to a broader criticism of capitalism as a regime for waste production and shows the domestic class basis of EUE. The second half of the essay re-asserts the centrality of national liberation to resolving contemporary crises.

Imperialism or Fossil Capitalism?

The rise of global warming as a “universal” issue has resurrected classic debates within Marxism. While Marx recognized the centrality of “primitive” accumulation to historical capitalism and linked that accumulation to his model of capitalism, he did not elaborate on a theory of colonialism and imperialism. His European successors had trouble breaking with the Eurocentrism of their radical tradition. Lenin and Luxemburg were the first prominent Marxist European theorists to pay attention to imperialism and the periphery of capitalist development. With the rise of the Asian and African national liberation movements and radicalized Latin American states, theories of neocolonialism and dependency emerged to holistically interpret the dialectic of “interior” and “exterior” in peripheral underdevelopment. A certain Marxism resisted these interventions, suppressing the role of primitive accumulation while building a historical interpretation of capitalism with origins essentially in domestic British class structures and polemicizing against autocentered development for the periphery (Brenner, 1977). These efforts laid the groundwork for theorizing the state absent imperialism, even while others from similar positions re-incanted the daemon of a historically progressive role for capitalism (Ahmad, 1983). This debate—which refused to engage seriously most theorists of dependency and neocolonialism and reduced development to industrialization—was not resolved but rather politically evaporated as part of intellectual structural adjustment. ⁴

Amidst the climate crisis—the broader ecological crisis is increasingly sidestepped—much political ecology has partially restaged the discussion, with accompanying Eurocentrism, methodological nationalism, and overfocus on the industrial and Northern spheres of the labor process. This has required retooling historical materialism and Marxism, building a foundation for subsequent CO₂-centric strategic elaborations. These theories draw arbitrary spatial and social borders around their conception of accumulation, in effect claiming that much of the periphery, barely woven into the CO₂ circuit, is not relevant to theorizing the political ecology of emissions, and erasing the agrarian question from ecological politics.

Such carbon reductionism is not new. ⁵ However, Andreas Malm (2013) has elaborated it amidst considerable theoretical magic works, setting out a new “general formula” of “fossil capital”: “increasing quantities of CO₂…are a necessary part of capital accumulation…they are materially indispensable for value creation… Fossil capital…is self-expanding value passing through the metamorphosis of fossil fuels into CO₂” (Malm, 2013, pp. 51–52, italics in original). This theory runs into a number of issues. First, it implies energies that increase labor productivity ought to be part of general theories of accumulation—animal capital to water capital to fossil capital to solar capital. Yet, although fossil fuels are physically integrated into productive circuits and end-use commodities in profound ways, capitalism is likely capable of shifting away from emitting CO₂. The theory of fossil capital, which prioritizes climate, sidesteps the distributional consequences of alternative energy installations (Dunlap, 2019; Franquesa & Bartolome, 2018; Stock & Birkenholtz, 2021), and mineral sourcing, whose costs and benefits will fall upon imperialist and capitalist lines of power and powerlessness.

The framework justifies carbon exceptionalism using “emergency” logic, reducing the ecological crisis and the broader crisis of social reproduction to global warming. Yet, the nature “of the terrain on which all other [struggles] operate,” the so-called necessary conditions for social reproduction on a world scale are implied or asserted rather than argued (Malm, 2016, p. 287). Soil erosion and biodiversity loss have been equally necessary for capital accumulation. ⁶ Poor peasants can shift to more drought resilient crops, but not if germplasm diversity has been destroyed by the Green Revolution, or if trophic webs collapse, or if planetary boundaries are otherwise exceeded (see Pörtner et al., 2021; Rockström et al., 2009). Global warming is one amongst many peripheral crises.

Furthermore, “fossil capital” overstates its own centrality to and explanatory capacity of “fossil capital” to accumulation on a world scale, erasing the contours of imperialist devastation and targeting, and contemporary resistance. Drawing on Postone, Malm argues, “the temporality of capitalist property relations is homologous…time as incorporeal repository of events which heeds no seasons…or other concrete appearances in nature” (2013, p. 55). He and other carbon socialists point out that the peak period of capitalist growth has been associated with the industrial revolution and carbon-based energy sources to justify the effective replacement of monopoly capital (and imperialism as a stage of capitalism) with “fossil capital” due to its role in the expansion of surplus value and the creation of capital as unrooted in nature.

Although Malm tries to soften his assertion and claims he is merely illustrating a tendency, this argument is mistaken. It sidesteps how postcolonial versus imperial nation-states are politically positioned in the process of accumulation on a world scale. For the myopic focus on energy sources understates a central feature of the last two centuries: European colonialism and the qualitative advance of European technologies of destruction. Settler devastation itself has been encompassing for its victims. Associated fossil-fueled growth has been linked with eradication or partial dismantling of the productive forces of the periphery (Patnaik & Patnaik, 2016, pp. 30–37). War is as central as oil and coal to capital, if not more so. Furthermore, capitalist property relations do rest on concrete appearances in nature, directly structuring global accumulation, and such appearances show no secular tendency toward disappearance. Many commodity crops can only be produced in the periphery, which is why it harbors massive labor reservoirs and is darkened by underdevelopment, to compress tropical commodity prices and preserve the value of money; such concrete appearances were essential to the primitive accumulation via drain that produced monopoly capitalism (Patnaik & Patnaik, 2021). Likewise, oil production is largely concentrated in the periphery, a fact that Malm only recognizes through his commentary on extraction. Yet, not all oil is extracted, and the politics of who controls oil wealth has been central to which oil gets extracted. The presence and nature of oil in the Arab region have led to de-development and decreased envelopment of Arab region working-class populations into the fossil-fuel energy system (Ajl, 2021c; Kadri, 2016, p. 249ff;). Syria and Yemen have seen decreased per capita and even gross CO₂ emissions as part-and-parcel of the US wars (Higgins, forthcoming) persecuted against those countries. Such wars are integral to accumulation on a world scale. They are not separate from the law of value.

Asserting rather than establishing the homologousness of contemporary capitalism is a pretext to overprivilege climate over broader ecological crises, overlook super-exploitation and international value flows, suppress the basic fact that many people in the world system are not and will not have anything more than a marginal relationship to fossil capital except as its energy-poor victims, and ignore the imperial warfare associated with defending petrodollar imperialism and the profits associated with core oil monopolies.

Strategy echoes analysis. Malm makes fossil fuel–induced global warming “the movement of movements, at the top of the food chain” (2016, p. 287). Such false universalism is a pretext to elevate the agencies of Northern workers or other social layers, postponing other liberatory struggles, and making the particular needs of the periphery subject to a broader cause claimed to be universal but reflecting the viewpoint of a Northern left. Focusing on emissions at the point of consumption and Northern transport and asserting a climate “emergency” does not consider how climate damages pass through the prism of peripheral social arrangements, nor that such damages may only be addressed by social blocs which need to produce CO₂ to develop, nor that they often prioritize anti-imperialism or agrarian reform rather than emissions reductions. This parochialism leads to adventurist strategy based on political and social actors who can intervene to sabotage (“blow up”) those circuits at the point of distribution (Malm, 2021): the core industrial and petty bourgeois (Sakshi, 2021; Wilt, 2021). ⁷

Furthermore, reducing the socio-ecological problem of waste under industrial capitalism to CO₂, and a blindness to specific peripheral social-ecological challenges, leads to neocolonial solutions like “recommending” global veganism or Half-Earth conservation (Ajl & Wallace, 2021; Büscher et al., 2017). Finally, “fossil capital” fetishism has defended nonexistent climate drawdown technologies (Malm & Carton, 2021). This is an antifossil capitalism lacking social agents, disinterested in dialogue with the particular demands emanating from the periphery, and intrigued with a voluntarist notion of “taking over” capitalist technology or planning solutions, ideologically disorganizing resistance to them.

Eco-modernism

Another political ecology, in essence a subset of the fossil capital literature, has a similar class analysis, if sometimes more attentive to class composition in the core, in particular the role of environmental/climate NGOs. Yet, these eco-modernist kinds of literature echo fossil capital in their acceptance of a secular tendency toward proletarianization, referring to the working class as an undifferentiated mass without distinct orientations to the productive apparatus, or primarily or solely as the industrial laboring/unionized sectors, and ignore if not deprecate discussion of non-directly waged labor within the process of social labor. Some of this literature goes further yet in its inattention to class analysis, severing the natural environment from social labor, claiming natural systems do not require labor for their reproduction (Huber, 2018), and this is why such “nature” is not valued. This notion rests on the a priori apartheid concept of radical human–nature separations, eliding the historical and contemporary role of labor in producing and maintaining socio-natures (Erickson, 2008; Toledo, 2001). For while such labor is necessary (historically) for the creation and reproduction of the natural environment and human societies, it is seldom accounted for, and the lack of accounting of this nature is connected to racial, patriarchal, and colonial ideologies which have justified the appropriation of peripheral land (Gill, 2021).

When it comes to technology, it embraces a wide range of now-capitalist-promoted technologies, from biofuels to nuclear to lab-grown meat (Ajl, 2021a, pp. 42–56). ⁸ This technological politics confuses opposition to the agenda of monopoly capital, which is implemented through certain paths of technological development.

Such theory likewise echoes the fossil capital work in ignoring South–North value flows and super-exploitation which constitute the particular shape of Northern social compacts—the Brenner hypothesis teleported to the ecological sphere—and thereby lays the groundwork for national socialisms (Huber, 2022). It has been broadly silent on trade-union support for imperialism. These points do not deny the core working class a role in ecological transition but clarify that constituting an internationalist front must account for the difference within the working class on national bases, and the need to rupture with union support for imperialism.

Capitalist Industrialization Against Nature: Extractivism

Another dominant set of themes within contemporary political ecology concerns the human-environment metabolism. One cluster, extractivism, is probably the most popular theory of political ecology. It originally focused on popular territorial resistance against extraction, including “internal” struggles within Western capitalist settler-states. By now, this literature enfolds criticisms of industrial agriculture and labor exploitation more broadly. Superficially, these theories take seriously peripheral social struggles, claiming a continuity between Southern neoliberal and neo-developmental states concerning their inability to break from ecologically harmful resource extraction, and blaming Southern commodity exports for contributing to underdevelopment. However, conceptually, extractivism is incoherent, lacks serious attention to futures planning and displaces politics onto the South. Its diagnoses are frequently paired with attacks against an undertheorized “development,” a term that conflates any number of distinct models and class interests that affected how productive forces and their products were deployed and distributed. They furthermore mirror the fossil capital literature in focusing only on a portion of the labor process, ignoring the contradictions of Southern development and national liberation as they unfold against imperialism and monopoly capital.

Consider some definitions. Gudynas defines extractivism as the “appropriation of natural resources,” (2019), while Svampa writes that “neo-extractivism refers to a way of appropriating nature and a development model based on the over-exploitation of natural goods,” alongside export orientation (2019, pp. 6–7). Klein writes that extractivism entails “the reduction of human beings…into labor to be brutally extracted, pushed beyond limits” (2014, p. 169). Two problems arise. First, their particular notion of appropriation/exploitation, as applied to all use of natural resources and capitalist use of labor, is incoherent. All historical social production involves human use of non-human nature—“[a]ll production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society” (Marx, 1973, p. 87)—while exploitation in the technical sense is specific to capitalism (García Linera, 2013). Extractivism cannot be this kind of appropriation unless it is a historical constant, which would mean it cannot meaningfully describe a distinct accumulation regime; and “natural goods” can be consumed in a production process and not restored—let alone their productivity enhanced, as is possible in some forms of agriculture—but not exploited except metaphorically, or at least not like humans are exploited. Indeed, Klein’s framework submerges proletarianization, labor exploitation, commodification, and capitalism in a gelatinous “extraction,” offering little strategic map and less conceptual clarity. Second, their notion of “processing” is simplistic. Mining implies the application of constant and variable capital to non-human nature; “petroleum necessitates installations just as expensive as steel” (Emmanuel, 1972, p. xxx); the capital ratio in extractive sectors and agriculture can be exceedingly high. The degree of processing can, but need not, correlate with increased value captured domestically which can, but need not, mean a greater labor share of value secured in the production process. Depending on technologies of production, greater domestic processing can, but need not, mean greater damage to non-human nature. These metrics fail to capture in a clear way the choices involved in development planning and fail to illuminate historical shifts in processing and value-added within the periphery. ⁹

Furthermore, as with “fossil capital,” this framework is trapped in methodological nationalism, although with the optic on allegedly native-born pathologies of peripheral developmentalism. Although there are gestures to the global evolution of the world-capitalist system and the historical insertion of peripheral states into the global division of labor, the world system and imperialism persistently evaporate from nationalist sociologies. There is hardly a single clear reference in extractivist literature to the difficulties in moving toward nationalization or large-scale agrarian reform in a moment wherein peripheral state structures, such as Haiti, Iraq, Syria, or previously Afghanistan have been subject to predatory attacks and partial re-colonization by core states. The imperialist regulation of the international division of labor only enters obliquely, through a discussion of “globalization” (Gudynas, 2018, p. 66) or “accumulation by dispossession” (Lander, 2013, pp. 92–94), drawing on David Harvey to erase “the structured nature of the centre–periphery contradiction in historical capitalism” (Moyo et al., 2012, p. 88).

Throughout the extractivist literature and the nationalist institutional sociology of the “compensatory state,” there is little attention to the world-systemic, imperial, factors contributing to the inability and unwillingness of “Pink Tide” states to confront imperialism and neocolonial class structures (Koerner, 2022), including neocolonial blackmail targeting the regional titan Brazil (Antunes de Oliveira, 2022), or sanctions levied on the only state to swim against the tide to implement a genuine land-to-the-tiller agrarian reform, Zimbabwe. Nor does extractivism mention the burden of arms spending, or the need of radical states to constrain their militaries to avoid coups, the most frequent vector of imperialist intrigue in the region. Additionally, ruling-class Thermidor—landlord hiring of mercenaries to assassinate peasant activists to stymie the Venezuelan agrarian reform, or Bolivian ruling-class attacks against the MAS project (Vázquez & Arias, 2021)—does not enter extractivismo sociology. The silence on sanctions vis-à-vis the development of value-added processes in Venezuela and their implications in terms of capacity to access finance is another blindness (Rodríguez, 2021). These accounts, additionally, are silent on the US role in the coups that isolated radicalized Latin American states (Svampa, 2019, pp. 54–55; Webber, 2020).

Furthermore, this literature underplays the achievements of the radical governments in locking in greater absolute and relative shares of value domestically and moving toward greater in situ transformation as has occurred in Bolivia. It is missed that such governments did not merely attack a central basis of domestic accumulation but swam against the neoliberal current which marshals credit down-rating, destabilization, and sanctions against bids to shift the world balance of power. Indeed, this literature uses the macroeconomic stabilization achievements of the Bolivian government as a criticism of its development model (McNelly, 2020). It is accordingly missed that any shift toward socialized planning in a peripheral state risks imperial-imposed currency debauchment and sanctions, and large hard currency reserves and low inflation are a buffer against those tools.

Another facet of this methodological nationalism is assessing the ecological record of “extractivist” states only within the territorial box. Yet, it is universally recognized that Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia have been calling for ecological debt repayments, one way to avoid social versus ecological trade-offs inevitable in mineral extraction. Ecuador has enshrined the “right to nature” in its constitution, and even attempted to negotiate with core states to avoid having to exploit its oil reserves in Yasuni National Park—a proposal which those states did not support. Furthermore, member states of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América, ALBA) helped block the commodification of the atmosphere implied in carbon markets (Watts & Depledge, 2018). Additionally, this literature proceeds absent a serious historical sociology of the role of China, reducing it to another “extractive” partner within the international division of labor (cf. Moyo, 2016), while kindred work, sometimes invoking a dubious “globalization,” focuses on China’s role in a new dependency cycle in Africa and Latin America. However, China cannot assume anything like the historical US–European colonial or neocolonial relationship to the remainder of the periphery, because China is too big to have its own periphery—while it can import surplus value, it cannot do so at a rate that would enable it to become a pole of polarized accumulation, even were it to fully displace the contemporary core (Li, 2021). Furthermore, China is not imperialist, since imperialism concerns a relationship of net value import and the violence which stabilizes and deepens such value flows (Kadri, 2019). Finally, China does not use primitive accumulation to restructure internal political orders in the periphery. At the interstate level is often cooperative rather than exploitative (Miriam & To, 2021), and it is leading the world in renewables construction and installation, alongside rapid reductions in pollution. ¹⁰

Each interpretive decision places the burden of political transformation entirely on the South and sidesteps the historical and contemporary significance of regionalism and Latin American unity in socialist construction and development planning (Bruckmann & Dos Santos, 2015; Marini, 1969). Extractivismo too often offers a political ecology without a geopolitics of development: eco-socialism in one country.

Extractivismo does not simply diagnose underdevelopment but implies or calls for alternative forms of, or alternatives to, development. Take three examples. First, Gudynas (2019) calls for suppressing extraction entirely. Second, Acosta proposes “sustainable activities…in the sphere of manufacturing, agriculture, tourism, and especially knowledge. Nature must definitely not be damaged any further” (2013, p. 80). But to insist on the categorical nondamage to nature displaces the contradictions of popular development from the North, the historical major polluter, to the South. Others accept that the “post-extraction option … [would imply] exploiting natural assets” alongside regional integration (Svampa, 2012, p. 51); on paper, the agenda of the Latin American radical states. To advance the debate, a sociology of the forces which blocked that agenda is needed; but a world-systemic sociology, enfolding domestic class obstacles—for these states did not dispossess their bourgeoisies – is precisely where extractivism is weakest. ¹¹

In terms of planning, extractivism literature retreats from 1980s-era work on industrialization toward basic needs and eco-development within a self-reliant framework (Oteiza et al., 1983). Much appears to reject Third World sovereign industrialization, especially metallurgy, machine tools, and associated research and development. Calls for “sustainability” and sustainable manufacturing imply this (but seldom clearly state it), keeping in mind that industrialization is intrinsically nonsustainable and polluting, because it works on abiotic materials and needs an external agent to control its wastes, whereas soil damage directly harms agriculture (Duncan & Duncan,1996). Extractivism does not seriously approach the relative rural–urban balances needed for a popular anticolonial and anti-imperialist development path nor have an answer for what is to be done for Third World poor whose basic well being is directly tied to export commodities. In terms of planning, extractivism retreats from dependency and neocolonialism literature which advocated commodity cartels and price planning, understanding one could not simply rupture with capitalism and associated trade flows.

A cousin of these critiques are dismissals of socialist construction, operating under “the pattern of Western civilisation and of unlimited confidence in progress” (Lander, 2013, p. 88). However, the extractivist/antidevelopmental literature has devoted little attention to how monopoly capital has deformed socialist construction, and less to actually reconstituting an emancipatory ideological framework, defending the needs of workers and peasants, and identifying and resisting the agenda of monopoly capital (Jha et al., 2020). For example, Escobar suggests that North–South “divisions…another modern binary…will tend to dissolve as pluriversal perspectives asserts [sic] themselves” (2015), with modernity displacing neocolonialism and imperialism. Such dismissals risk denigrating the role of socialist construction in development and national liberation through deployment of a “decolonial” neither left-nor-right logic. They ignore the lineage of thought drawing on modernist thinking, and engaging with alternative development, alternative/appropriate technology, eco-development, agroecology, or people’s science movements, which were part of rather than outside the history of socialist construction (Mauro, 2021; Schmalzer, 2016). It remains unclear how much antisystemic struggle and socialist-linked thought is dismissed as “modernity’s” or “developmentalist baggage,” terms that this literature seldom defines. Indeed, some of this literature totally erases peripheral Marxism, which grounded those struggles (Rodney, 2018, ch. 1). ¹² It is noteworthy that anti-“modern” stances based on tradition have been taken up by reactionary forces in India, for example (Krejčík, 2019); and absent a revolutionary force capable of taking over the state, delinking, nationalizing all domestic enterprises, and breaking from the law of value, what state could possibly rupture with what the literature diagnoses as “developmentalism?” Indeed, taking state power is not even on the agenda (cf. Heron & Dean, 2022), as disdain for the state suffuses this literature, against the Chavista position that “it is not an option to be governed by the criminals who ruled in the past” (Marquina & Gilbert, 2020) or the Arab nationalist position defending the “peripheral nation”s working [class’s]… right to exercise sovereignty, through the state, over its human and natural resources” (Kadri, 2016, p. 272). This hostility to the state has bled into extractivist theorists’ concealment of US intervention in Latin America. ¹³

Degrowth

Among prominent new-wave Northern climate theories, degrowth has gone beyond epistemological “decolonization” to four matters: the burden of Northern sociopolitical transformation, directly engaging with the labor aristocracy and imperial modes of life; technologies for transformation (Vastinjan, 2018, 2021); EUE and climate debt; capitalism and sometimes neocolonialism and imperialism. Degrowth has above all thrown a wrench in growthist ideology’s legitimation of Northern capitalism.

Critical debate has heretofore primarily focused on whether degrowth advocates austerity for the core working class or mischaracterizes capitalism. The former is a serious question of how and when to enfold an increasingly immiserated core working class into an international front amidst South–North value flows, yet it is increasingly taken up from the perspective of nationalist Northern eco-politics. ¹⁴ The second objection is relevant but often misphrased. Prominent theories of degrowth are increasingly anticapitalist but tend to avoid theorizing value, deploying a “simplified conceptual apparatus” (Heron, 2022), often focusing on notions of “bullshit jobs” or the subjective uselessness or irrationality of capitalist growth, and sometimes inattentive to capitalism’s unevenness. The simplified conceptual apparatus is a shared ground between most (but not all) degrowth analyses, laying the groundwork for lack of clarity when it comes to the history of global accumulation. ¹⁵ Accordingly, some of this work has been opaque on historical capitalism’s dependence on peripheral de-development. Such de-development is not what degrowth theorists mean, but more focus on the historical evaporation of the productive forces by Northern monopoly and colonial capitalism would add heft to degrowth. Furthermore, degrowth is seldom sufficiently clear that growth is a technical term referring to the sum total of transactions in an economy, and such transactions can have vastly different developmental implications depending on the local and global balance of class power. Furthermore, growth not only refers to very different relationships over different periods, but is not necessarily a priority of capitalism—above all a relationship of hierarchy. Finally, although degrowth is basically clear that it is for the core, the partial silence when it comes to peripheral paths to popular development leaves alliances and politics vague.

Because of these theoretical and political silences or opacities, degrowth runs several risks. One, that it remains distant from the vehicles needed for national liberation and delinking (Amin, 1987). Will degrowth enter dialogue with Arab resistance forces, and national-popular development in Zimbabwe, and along with many Venezuelan and Bolivian grassroots movements, choose to struggle through and for rather than against the state? The dominant current in degrowth focuses on antiextractivist or non-state forces in Latin America to the exclusion of the state. Such a position has risked sliding into an alliance with the US–EU agenda of leaning on Latin American grassroots struggles to see radical states as the primary contradiction rather than insisting that any resolution of such contradictions, under any circumstances, cannot be allied with US imperialism. A second risk: degrowth faces attempts at recuperation from pro-capitalist forces within the imperial core, precisely by seizing on its theoretical blurriness. ¹⁶ A third risk is blurriness in theorizing transition. While “small is beautiful” self-reliance has been central to national liberation, degrowth does not deal with the large portions of the global working class woven into monopoly capital supply chains, particularly in the industrial sector. What strategy can exist outside their nationalization and in the periphery, the mobilization of domestic surplus through agrarian reform to build up productive forces? Such an agenda would take shape against monopoly capital, yet degrowth can melt opposition to capitalism into a call for “social justice” (Fitzpatrick et al., 2022) instead of decommodification and social control. For that reason, it remains acutely vulnerable to instrumentalization.

EUE

A fourth strain of political ecology, EUE sketches the polarized nature of the world system. This literature developed from studies in Brazil (Bunker, 1988) and fused with older work, tracing back to CEPAL structuralism, on uneven exchange and declining terms of trade for Southern exports. That older work focused on commodity export reliance. Subsequent elaborations quantified and historicized unequal exchange in South–North trade, exceeding relative productivity differentials—which, however, reflect earlier primitive accumulation/unequal exchange (Amin, 1977b; Kadri, 2016, p. 249ff).

Some of that earlier work (Amin, 1977a, p. 138ff) referred to how the “waste” of the nonhuman environment occurred unevenly and in a polarized manner, causing more acute ecological crisis in the periphery than in the core. They also pointed out that a “fair” price should include a rent sufficient to allow for maintenance of renewable inputs or a replacement activity for nonrenewable ones, and that pre-capitalist “forms of appropriation” allow for the non-payment of that rent (Amin, 1977b, p. 154). Yet he did not elaborate this insight empirically or theoretically. More recent work has focused on how relocation of industrial production from core to periphery displaces pollution or aggravates it; on inequalities in use of atmospheric space and planetary capacity to absorb and metabolize CO₂; on inequalities in material flows measured in tonnage; and on unequal deaths and vulnerability to climate-triggered disasters.

Clearly, these findings almost always relate to periphery-core value flows. Yet there are methodological and theoretical problems with inferring exploitation or value transfer from these tabulations; much of this literature does not theoretically elaborate the facts it observes or elaborates it in ways divorced from value theory, and such facts reflect different types of enclosures or encroachments. First, we should be clear that EUE is not a universal theory of the ecological consequences of imperialism. Imperialism concerns net surplus-value transfer between national capitals, and the project of primitive accumulation, domination, and destruction inherent to stabilizing global value flows. That can involve the military attack or settler-colonial destruction within countries or territories whose productive forces are not central to accumulation through competition, as with Haiti and Palestine, or which were subject to settler-capitalist invasion. Second, on the theory’s own terms, national accounts do not reflect all the raw material displacement involved in the trade, for example, of refined minerals (Frame, 2014). And third, sometimes EUE mirrors errors in extractivism, not engaging with value flows and the global structure of monopoly capital. Unequal tonnage cannot itself establish exploitation, since it would imply US national capital is exploited when the US exports wheat, corn, and soybeans and their derivatives—in fact, wheat export, using massive hectares, is a component of imperialism through establishing import dependence and political control over Third World development (Friedmann & McMichael, 1989). It also sidesteps distinct productive conditions for commodities. EUE often and mistakenly conflates those flows to the ecological damage which such flows can, but need not, rest on—wheat exports, for example, happen to, but need not, rest on soil degradation, or the undermining of the natural conditions for production.

We might do better to disaggregate the phenomena to which EUE exchange occurs, and rework them using appropriate tools, in particular through an appreciation of the role of the non-human environment in constituting value—something much-debated within contemporary Marxism (Moore, 2015). For example, when considering declining terms of trade for Southern exports on world markets, which logically and historically correspond to increased Northern usage through embodied flows of Southern use-values or wealth including land, water, or primary production, it is not clear that “appropriation” of peripheral natures by the core is what is happening.

Such unevenness is real, yet needs to be theorized using dependency/neocolonial theories. We can thus reframe this aspect of EUE as referring to the unequal use and access to non-human nature through monopoly/imperialist control of world trade relations, as they interlock with local class structures, which are implicated in national-level primitive accumulation—neocolonialism. One aspect occurs as peripheral exports exchange for capital and suffers from uneven terms of trade as one national capital enters uneven competition with another national capital (Dussel, 1988). Power relations allow monopoly price-setting for commodities below their value for peripheral exports, and above their value for core commodities. Furthermore, different national capitals struggle over shares of rent. Finally, imperialist war continuously resets overall terms of trade, and core states war in part to ensure low wages in the periphery, while super-exploitation partially compensates for worsening terms of trade, as argued by Marini (1973). Higher core wages are, finally, bound to higher prices for core exports.

This trade, however, is distinct from appropriation or expropriation, which implies primitive accumulation and the use of violence. Such violence is constant to imperialism and contributes to the relative power of different nation-states in the exchange relationship yet is conceptually distinct from that dynamic. Furthermore, the actual appropriation of or encroachment on nature operates within the neocolonial capitalist nation-space. It can be stopped there if necessary, or from there that higher prices can be demanded for commodities, or value-added processing can occur, or where commodities can be consumed without entering unequal competition on the world market. On the other side of the historical coin, when national states have emplaced domestic policies that push against the law of value via decommodification, they have faced imperial violence via sanctions, proxy war, and direct war to bring them back into the sphere of “normal” capitalist trade relations. Such imperialist actions help constitute EUE but are not identical to it.

There are then the EUE theories dealing more directly with ecological damages, which are related but not reducible to polarized use of global resources. However, often EUE literature has proceeded without sufficient attention to theorization of capital as a social metabolism: the capital relation’s historical production of ecological crisis. Mapping ecological crises and disparities in pollution, health outcomes, or vulnerabilities to natural disaster is not the same as theorizing them. The systemic destruction of human and non-human nature as inputs into the labor process suggests the need to elaborate a robust notion of waste, bringing ecological destruction into value theory systematically. Marx brought out this process in embryonic form, referring to how “[c]apitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the labourer” (Marx, 1976, ch. 15). The concept of waste is an elaboration of that process. Note, this is distinct from primitive accumulation, which refers to the separation of workers from their means of production through involuntary and external means (Patnaik, 2017). If primitive accumulation in the core led to widespread social differentiation and proletarianization, this occurred on the back of widespread wastage and destruction of the Third and Fourth Worlds. Waste is the destruction of humanity and humanity’s inorganic body and has been present as in input into the accumulation process since 1492. As Kadri writes,

[a]s in imperialist war, the degradation of nature by capital, the incarnation of the impersonal and objective forces of history, is means to control or regulate the reproduction of labour. Labour is the source of surplus value, the unmediated profits. The erosion of the social and natural support platforms of labour, the measures that reduce populations or shorten life’s expectancy relative to the historically determined level, shrink the share of value from the social product obtained by labour or undermine the spirit of labour; the spirit of labour here refers to fighting subject in the working of class, which would otherwise enhance the share of labour from the social product. (Kadri, 2019, p. xi)

Capital both relies on and undermines those forms of social nature which are taken as a “given” for the reproduction of labor at any given moment—an analogue of the workers’ consumption fund. As capital encounters varied “natures”—those modified and maintained by human labor and those which are “free” gifts—a number of forms of degradation are possible. It may transform them with pollution, which alchemizes that portion of nature into “a fund for the accumulation of capital” (Marx, 1973, ch. 24), and such waste is observed empirically and registered socially through the loss of human life before its historically given possible level, or deteriorated life-quality, thereby lowering the overall burden on capital of the reproduction of labor.

EUE has likewise pointed to capital mobility and the drive to labor arbitrage by industrialization, whether under neocolonialism or under sovereign projects like China’s. This tendency moves toward relative under-reproduction and overpollution of peripheral societies and their industrial sites (Althouse et al., 2021; Duan et al., 2021). Within this set of dynamics, the sorts of degradation inherent in the many technical–social–ecological processes to which EUE refers are similar: pollution from industrial production, using highly polluting extractive technologies, or avoiding clean-up costs. EUE is almost inherent in contemporary labor arbitrage, as ecological damage differentially impacts core and peripheral working classes. The latter pays a higher social “price” for surplus-value creation, as it comes not merely from their labor but less capital expended on ecological protection. Therefore, we can bring the wage relationship into EUE by pointing out that lower wages in the periphery have large-scale ecological consequences. They are a cause of the spatial displacement of highly polluting factories. Yet, lower wages of peripheral labor will tend to correlate with a more permissive environment for ecological harm, generally reflecting the overall weakness of peripheral national capitals and their states, a “hard” barrier produced by postcolonial state formation and imperialism. This allows for the suppression of constant capital costs related to health and safety linked to the natural environment, which were costs imposed on Northern capital through ecological movements forcing a new historical norm. Northern air and water are protected whereas Southern airs and natures are not.

Socially necessary labor time for the production of commodities may decrease when production moves to places where the cost of protecting human health and ecological clean-up and remediation does not add to the constant capital cost. Thus Somerville’s (2022, p. 68) objection that higher wages (and one can infer, better protection from ecological harms) occurs “primarily because the cost of labour power reproduction is higher in the North than in the South” is not so much wrong as it entirely misses the point. Such costs differ on North–South lines in part because of Northern interference in the South to throttle wages through endless methods. Furthermore, Somerville refers to wages as the cost of the “daily and generational reproduction” of labor, yet, this is not a given but reflects the achievements of the class struggle as crystallized in national-level wages, subject to imperialist and neocolonial suppression. Similarly, constant capital costs are reduced through lack of Southern labor-environmental protections. And imperialism engineers such lack of protections politically by undermining political sovereignty and supporting the installation of socially regressive and ecologically destructive peripheral governments, as with Bolsonaro. These are the phenomena toward which EUE points, and they cannot be denied.

EUE has furthermore pointed to the greater impact of climate change, or the colonization and primitive accumulation of the atmosphere, on the South versus the North, including the direct destruction of lives through natural disasters or long-run damage to the productivity of the South. Yet EUE literature discussing this (Roberts & Parks, 2006) has not really theorized such inequality. The low developmental level of the periphery is cause and effect of imperialism, which aggresses or weakens Southern state structures, particularly the weak ones—it cannot, for example, effectively target China—producing a weak social and physical infrastructure incapable of resisting or mitigating these impacts. Such impacts, in turn, impact working/peasant classes in peripheral states far more than the ruling classes, a fact which EUE’s emphasis on national aggregates has not sufficiently illuminated. Contrariwise, Cuba’s capacity to avoid death from climate change indicates the importance of revolutionary mobilization and redistribution in avoiding ecological damage (Sims & Vogelmann, 2002).

Finally, EUE can occur through forms of encroachment which destroy the natural environment or commons—fields into factories (Sovacool, 2021). And as Ossome and Naidu (2021, p. 81) write, “given that the need for reproduction of human life exists whether or not people are employed by capital, the exponential growth of the surplus population under neoliberalism has deepened the general level of reliance on unremunerated gendered labour necessary to ensure survival of this population.” Such a lens clarifies the central role of this semi- or fully proletarianized, and often female, class in social reproduction, including the social reproduction of nature, on a world scale. For such labor is unremunerated and gendered and also relies on nature in a less mediated way in the periphery than in the core: wood for heating, small-scale agriculture for provisioning. Pollution or encroachment-and-destruction, therefore, may undermine even more the conditions of reproduction of the peripheral working class in the broadest sense, whether through the simple eradication of the environment upon which they rely —producing flight to slums or cities—or poisoning it, cutting further into their well-being and shortening their lives below their historically given level. We may consider this a further elaboration on some of Moore’s (2015) comments regarding the lack of payment for peripheral nature.

These modifications of EUE theory show the relationship between uneven flows, polarized patterns of pollution, neocolonialism and local class structures, and dynamics of expropriation, encroachment, and lack of remediation of local pollution within the periphery. They give us insight into the class dimensions of EUE. These reformulations accordingly provide us with better-ground theoretical lenses to offer insight into dynamics of internal colonialism, gendered social reproduction, and the need for “liberation from dependency…national domination…and liberation of the oppressed people in the nation” (Dussel & Yanez, 1990, p. 95, italics in original). They furthermore allow us to reconsider social struggles mapped by the extractivism literature, without abandoning sovereign industrialization, which is frequently suggested, but less often stated outright, in a wide range of political ecology concerned with a diffuse “extraction.” EUE furthermore helps us see how such price suppression and damage to nature relate to social struggles resisting local damage to the ecology—the environmentalism of the poor. ¹⁷

Conceiving of capitalism as entropic, with value constituted by the waste of earth’s capacity to support life and human life, clarifies theoretical and programmatic steps to replace capitalist metabolism and value relations with substantively rational social planning. It is for these reasons that attention to the wide span of labor processes and the productive and natural forces to which they are joined, the social subjects who undertake them, and the specific frame within which to nest those disparate-yet-unified processes, subjects, and locations, is a necessary step to create a theory of ecological revolution capable of unifying social forces from their different locations. For example, Prasad’s (2019, 2020) point about the labor needed for the social reproduction of the environment—labor which is part of the value relation—provides a methodological entry point to through which one could conceptualize the role of indigenous working classes which disproportionately engage in such nature-preservation work, and could be a basis for suturing the social struggles around extractive processes with broader antisystemic theory and practice. This perspective, not necessarily shared by those actors themselves, allows us to see the labor of biodiversity preservation and social reproduction as two sides of one coin, a coin which nevertheless in many ways accrues to monopoly capital, South and North, in ways similar to the role of unwaged labor of social reproduction, which has historically fallen upon women (Federici, 2012; James, 2012). ¹⁸ The challenge is in seeing it accrue to labor.

Conclusion

Political ecology has reached new stages of sophistication. But many Northern theories—and Southern theories uplifted in the North—continue to reject or sidestep the polarized nature of accumulation, disdain particular paths to the universal, especially national liberation, and seldom engage seriously with industrialization. Dominant models of “fossil capital” essentially rehearse central elements of modernization theory and the myth of development, implying a universal proletarianization process where none is possible, lacking a serious class analysis of the periphery, and positing either the “proletarian” as universal subject or offering a deficient analysis which simply avoids class analysis altogether in the contemporary moment, collapsing all global struggles into the need for a “movement of movements” in a universal struggle against climate change.

This article showed how within the post-development and extractivism literature, critiques of modernity and development continue to be pervasive. Yet, this work cannot provide a serious program going forward to deal with agrarian questions of ecology and social reproduction for the twenty-first century. It has furthermore elaborated some ways of deepening and enriching EUE analysis so that it can better reflect the development needs and serve national liberation in the twenty-first century. It has elaborated some notes toward rethinking EUE in ways attentive to neocolonialism, domestic class structures, and value theory. Furthermore, it has considered how to articulate EUE findings concerning uneven flows with Marxism in order to clarify distinctions between primitive accumulation via imperialism or domestic violence with the inequality characteristic of international trade relations in an imperialist world system.

Finally, this article has outlined some gaps in knowledge and pointed toward theoretical and political questions which remain open in contemporary development literature. In particular, it has highlighted the need for the return to and development of the classical literature around autocentered development, with, however, greater attention to the ecological texture of working-class, peasant, and semi-proletariat production and which productive forces can serve those people while avoiding excessive harm to the non-human ecology.

Continuing to develop these insights—in particular through returning to foundational literature about technology transfer, endogenous research and development capacity, ecodevelopment, styles of development, and appropriate technology, within an appropriate macroplanning framework and nested in the biggest cause, national liberation, alongside the generally unwalked peasant path to development—is now urgent as an order of the day.