Ecofeminist Ways, Ecosocialist Means: Life in the Post-Capitalist Future

Capitalism Nature Socialism

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Ecofeminist Ways, Ecosocialist Means: Life in the Post-capitalist Future

Leigh Brownhill & Terisa E. Turner

To cite this article: Leigh Brownhill & Terisa E. Turner (2020) Ecofeminist Ways, Ecosocialist Means: Life in the Post-capitalist Future, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 31:1, 1-14, DOI: 10.1080/10455752.2019.1710362 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2019.1710362

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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rcns20 CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 2020, VOL. 31, NO. 1, 1–14 https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2019.1710362

HOUSE ORGAN Ecofeminist Ways, Ecosocialist Means: Life in the Post-capitalist Future

Leigh Brownhill and Terisa E. Turner

An Ecofeminist Imperative If you want people to come aboard, you cannot leave them wondering where to find the gangplank. We, and others in this journal, have argued that ecosocialism that is not ecofeminist at heart is not worth its salt1 (Barca 2019; Brownhill and Turner 2019; Feder 2019; Giacomini et al. 2018; Kovel 2005). Ecofeminism is the recognition of and struggle against capitalists’ racist colonization and exploitation of (that is, extraction of profits from) nature and women. Ecofeminism, insofar as it is characterized by efforts to unite the exploited across historic social divisions (e.g. waged and unwaged), is the revolutionary way to an ecosocialist, post-capitalist future. It has proven difficult to convince some of our readers and socialist colleagues that contemporary anti-colonial, anti-capitalist ecofeminism has anything to do with their own seemingly unrelated areas of expertise or lived experience.2 As authors, editors, and activists, we took this as a challenge and an invitation to clarify and restate the case for the imperative of ecofeminism. Since Esther Boserup broke the news to the international development community that women mattered (1965), feminists in that field have worked to have “gender” accepted as a coordinate to be measured, defined, disaggregated, and mainstreamed for the purposes of achieving equality (Njuki, Parkins, and Kaler 2016; Turner and Fischer-Kowalski 2010; Waring 1988). A diverse global women’s movement, mobilizing over decades, has made significant but telling gains, including the recognition of women’s rights as human rights (Bunch 2018; van Leeuwen 2018), and, after Rwanda, the designation in international law of rape as an act of genocide (Russell-Brown 2003). “Genocidal rape” is a form of systematized

1Effective and efficient or, more literally, “deserving of their salary.” 2If seen in light of the Indigenous “two-spirits” (McNeil-Seymour 2017) and other ancient notions of the “gender spectrum,” the rhetoric of so-called Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists reveals a tacit racism, as well as inciting division and worse. Indigenous “Land Back” decolonization movements in Turtle Island/North America (Manuel 2017) also leave some leftist settlers feeling left out and defensive, as they may misconstrue the multi-ethnic politics of reparations movements in general and Indigenous sovereignty and treaty rights in particular; worthy topics of study beyond the scope of the current inquiry. © 2020 The Center for Political Ecology 2 HOUSE ORGAN ethnically-targeted rape, perpetrated under orders from a state or a non-state actor, as a means of establishing political control, or to destroy and decimate a community of people in the service of a dominant political-economic order. Its recognition in law is a victory for accountability, and provides legal principles and precedents that could be used to shed light on questions of rape culture, for instance, to distinguish two forms of pervasive rape, one (genocidal rape) that takes place during conflicts in warzones, and the other (rape culture) that occurs during peacetime in homes, at work, and in public places. Women have struggled for centuries to be considered human beings, de jure and de facto, and to be free from rape. We have not yet won (Facio and Miles 2018). But we are continuing the struggle by converging evermore effectively on a global scale.3 In development circles it would not be strange to hear well-meaning veter- inary scientists light-heartedly joke about “considering the cow as well as the bull,” as evidence of their effort to bring gender into their line of work. The scientists might be excused for being rightly underwhelmed by the tired, boi- lerplate, commodified “gender roles” pitched in corporatized international development projects, whose mantras concentrate on commodity value chains and global market development. In contrast, our ecofeminism focuses on commoning and subsistence, shaped by and in alliance with Indi- genous, peasant, and other women in struggle. During an official visit by Hillary Clinton in 1995, Bangladeshi village women reportedly felt sorry for her because she did not own even a single cow (Mies and Bennholdt- Thomsen 1999). For the Bangladeshi women, what was important was not a powerful husband nor money, but “what secures an independent subsistence” (1999, 3). Along the Turkwel River in Kenya’s North Rift Valley in a seemingly barren desert, Turkana women’s iconic resilience and stoic self-sufficiency are realized with goats; or more precisely, within age-old (and evolving) Indi- genous communal social relations that regulate shared access to the commons, including the river banks, acacia trees, and the acacia tree pods that feed the local livestock (McMurtry 2001, 825). The discoveries of gas and oil and investor interest in pipeline routes nearby (enclosures, real and in the offing), have had a deep negative impact on the life ways of the region’s pastoral peoples. It is the Indigenous people, and not the foreign investors, who have for millennia expertly stewarded this fragile ecosystem.4

3Idle No More, #SayHerName, #MeToo, #TimesUp, Collectivo LasTesis of Chile. Zapatista women convened the First International Gathering of Politics, Art, Sport, and Culture for Women in Struggle in Chiapas, Mexico in 2018, which some 7000 women attended (Hess 2018), and organized the Second International Gathering from 26–29 December 2019. http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2019/09/21/invitation-to-the- second-international-gathering-of-women-who-struggle/. 4The East African Rift Valley’s geology and ecology have gone through huge change over the two hundred and ﬁfty thousand-plus years during which the human species evolved in these lands (www.museums. or.ke/olorgesailie/). CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 3

Indigenous women’s stewardship of the commons and re-invention of subsistence livelihoods across the world are at the core of “ecosocialist ecofeminism”5 (Brownhill, Kaara, and Turner 2016; Gómez-Barris 2017, 2018; This Changes Everything 2015). This ecofeminism is notable for its radical grassroots and (unwaged) working class origins, as well as its propensity for building the kind of “unity in diversity” that wins peoples’ struggles, whether in women-led ecological movements (Brownhill, Kaara, and Turner 1997), or in struggles of women, youth, and people of color in urban and built environments (Blumberg et al. 2018; Salleh 2016; Turner and Brownhill 2007). And it is this kind of ecofeminist discourse, rather than a discourse of gender equality within the bounds of neoliberal capitalism, that can reveal the depth of the crisis faced by humanity today and its resolution in the “re-enchantment of the commons” (Federici 2018b).

Misogyny is a Matter of Ecology It may be easier to recognize ecofeminist demands within women’s ecology movements than within the popular struggles of workers and others in the late-capitalist industrial heartlands. For those who are not thoroughly alie- nated from nature and are able to draw their self-sufficiency directly from the natural world, the demand might be “Fish, not oil” (Niger Delta, Nigeria). But for others whose livelihoods are tied more immediately to the built environments of city streets and white- and blue-collar workplaces, a loud “No!” to sexual harassment and assault on the job is equally workers’ gendered struggle for agency and control over the ecologies they inhabit (e.g. #MeToo). Misogyny is, as a whole, a matter of ecology. Rape culture6 significantly changes or defines almost every woman’s relationship to the built and natural environment (Smith 2019). The Chilean women’s anti-rape anthem, “Un Vialodor en Tu Camino” (“A Rapist in Your Path”), performed on 25 November 2019 in recognition of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, within weeks had been performed in protest by large groups of women in dozens of countries (McGowan 2019):

It’s femicide, impunity for my murderer, it’s disappearance, it’s rape. And it wasn’t my fault, not where I was, nor how I was dressed. You are the rapist, you are the rapist.

5We are ecumenical about the terms “ecosocialist ecofeminism” and “ecofeminist ecosocialism”; we use them interchangeably. With the unqualiﬁed term “ecofeminism,” we also mean the “ecosocialist type” of ecofeminism. 6A term in used since the 1970s, rape culture is a set of general cultural beliefs supporting men’s violence against women, including the idea that this violence is a fact of life, that there is an association between violence and sexuality, that men are active while women are passive, and that men have a right to sexual intercourse. (Phipps et al. 2018,1) 4 HOUSE ORGAN

It’s the police, the judges, the state, the president. The oppressive state is a macho rapist. The lyrics, the accompanying dance, and their viral popularity are testimonies to the ubiquity of rape as a systemic delimiting of women’s ability to move freely and stay alive. The persistence of sexist and racist violence in the culture and political economy of late capitalism is tied, in the first place, to peoples’ alienation from nature and from their diverse means of “independent subsistence.” Enclosures pre-exist wages. The capitalist system of waged slavery began with respective historical dispossessions from commons and otherwise available independent means of life. In Europe and elsewhere historic enclosures also entailed witch hunts (Federici 2004, 2018a). The capital relation requires the maintenance of the state of alienation of producers from their means of production on a daily and generational basis in order to keep their lands and labor available for private and state profiteers to exploit. For women, this also entails alienation from our bodies and corporeal “means of production.” To ensure that the majority find it too difficult to unite to do much about their own exploitation and the destruction of our earthly commons, capital relies on the perpetual division of the 99 percent through racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other divisions, such as clinically-stratified wage gaps. We have argued that these social divisions take the form of a global “hierarchy of labor power,” that is cemented together with a “male deal” between capitalists and those dispossessed men who are enticed, impressed, acculturated, or employed to channel use and intrinsic values from (waged and unwaged) labor and nature into corporate commodity value chains (Brownhill 2009; Turner 1994; Turner and Brownhill 2001; see also Mies and Shiva 1993). We call this theoretical-methodological framework “ethnicized gendered class analysis.” Lord Lugard made male deals when he applied “Indirect Rule” to entrench British imperialism around the world: find the local men who could be embroiled in or forced into administering colonial policy; give them enough compensation and power (and brutal oversight); and let them organize the collection of taxes for the colonial administration, recruit labor for the white settlers, and enforce colonial by-laws that undermined the very livelihoods and security of their own people (Lugard 1922; Matthews 1937). What Indirect Rule did for British colonialism, the “male deal” does for global capitalism. We also recognize the “female male dealer” in women like Margaret Thatcher, Teresa May, Marine LePen, Jeanine Añez, Condo- leezza Rice, Hillary Clinton, Kirstjen Nielsen, or the female CIA chiefs who end up being even more “tough” than their male counterparts just to prove that they are not “soft,” emotional women, and are able “get the job done,” CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 5 that is, to advance enclosures, open markets, and call on the armed force of the state, even to torture and cage children, in order to stop anyone who opposes the goals of profitable enterprise.7 Rape culture, then, is not only a horrific, episodic side-effect of the colonization, enclosure, and alienation processes of capitalism; it is a constantly- present mechanism of capital accumulation and the preservation of private property. Rape enforces capitalists’ profit-making exploitation. Without the pervasive violence of misogyny and its imminent threat, women would not be producing labor power, cannon fodder, and cheap wage goods or allowing the enclosure of our commons. Male violence against women, whether through child abuse, pornography, prostitution, domestic violence, or rape, serves on a cultural level to limit the mobility, freedom, health, and safety of victims and survivors, but also of all other women and girls, who, to varying degrees, must calculate and adjust their lives to reduce the daily risk of violence. Rape culture further fundamentally serves the purposes of capitalist profit extraction, because it maintains and entrenches division, iso- lation, and the alienation of gendered and ethnicized members of the dispossessed class. Racist misogyny in North America is strong evidence of the genocidal ten- dencies that accompany corporate-led eco-imperialism, significantly in the vicinity of extractive industries (Democracy Now 2018; Faber 1993; Manuel 2017; Ray 2018). Indigenous legal scholar Beverly Jacobs (2017, 50) argues that

As a result of generations of abuse and control, Indigenous peoples have become victims in a long-standing abusive relationship and have been silenced through their lack of control over lands and resources, the genocidal policies of the residential school and child welfare systems, and the disrespect and violence against Indigenous women. In fact, Aboriginal women in Canada “are seven times more likely to be victims of homicide than non-Aboriginal women” (Watson 2018, 204). The old First Nations tenet is eerily resonant: “A people is not conquered until the hearts of their women are on the ground.” This principle, expressive of Indigenous women’s power in their communities, also helps explain the cold, colonial logic behind the scourge of sexual violence against Indigenous women and girls. It literally puts the hearts of women and girls on the ground, tries to silence and traumatize survivors, and in the process enables capital’s conquest and continued control of the peoples’ resources and territories. Anti- colonial ecofeminist activists are confronting these realities, including through mobilizing on behalf of the murdered and missing (Tolley, Martin, and

7See also Liberal Democratic party leader Jo Swinson breezily answering “Yes” when asked in a November 2019 interview if she was prepared, as a candidate for UK Prime Minister, to ever ﬁre nuclear weapons (Merrick 2019). 6 HOUSE ORGAN

Gilchrist 2012). In October 2019 Kanahus Manuel and Isha Jules of the Tiny House Warriors in British Columbia, Canada, were arrested for blocking work on a new Trans Mountain pipeline construction workers’ accommodation complex, or “man camp,”“over fears of violence against Indigenous women and girls” (Martens 2019).8 We can trace a centuries-long thread from the rapes at the ports of Chris- topher Columbus’s Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria, to the anti-rape struggles of women in unceded Secwepemc territory in British Columbia, to North Dakota’s Bakken oilfields, to the workers at Boston’s Battery Wharf Hotel (addressed below), and the Indigenous peoples living in the Amazon and Congo rainforests, where women continue to face harassment, violation, rape, trafficking, disappearance, and death, as the captains of industry under- take ongoing enclosures. Every enclosure and industrial fenceline, on “the green field and the factory floor,”9 finds a struggle on different fronts for people to have agency over their lives and environments, and as such, to overcome the capital relation. The way to win in these struggles is to unite across gender, racial, and other divides in alliances that can hold the line on inclusive demands best expressed by peasants, the Indigenous, and women of color, often, but not always, unwaged. Social movements and union campaigns of women at the bottom of the hierarchy of labor power are uniquely situated to enact the unity of the exploited class, across genders and ethnicities, and to thereby encompass and represent the experiences, needs, demands, and rights of all, in other words, to express the general class interest. This unity in diversity, or “gendered ethnicized class alliance,” is the kryptonite to capitalism’s Superman. Even a small amount can have a powerful impact.

An Ecofeminist Hotel Workers’ Strike? The international hotel industry’s commodity value chains have dozens of direct and exploitative links to nature, from commodiﬁcation of scenery (Isla 2015), such as historic and waterfront views, to industrial sourcing of foodstuﬀs, to disposal of toxic cleaning products, to workplace exposure to those toxins. What concerns us here, however, is the risk of exposure to sexual violence and harassment that constitutes another kind of toxin

8Manuel told reporters that “The risk of violence and loss of access to traditional lands and resources are all part of the wider issue of colonization” (Martens 2019). The Tiny House Warriors use non-violent direct action in the face of oil company impunity: “Ten tiny houses will be built and placed strategically along the 518 km Trans Mountain pipeline route to assert Secwepemc Law and jurisdiction and block access to this pipeline” (http://tinyhousewarriors.com/). See also Manuel’s treatment of frontline decolonization struggles (2017). 9From Billy Bragg’s 1985 miners’ strike-inspired anti-war anthem, Between the Wars: I kept the faith and I kept voting/ Not for the iron fist but for the helping hand/ For theirs is a land with a wall around it/ And mine is a faith in my fellow man/ Theirs is a land of hope and glory/ Mine is the green field and the factory floor/ Theirs are the skies all dark with bombers/ And mine is the peace we knew/ Between the wars. CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 7 within the hotel workplace ecology. For us, the demand for working women to be safe from sexual assault in their workplace, homes, and streets is as much an ecofeminist ecosocialist demand, as is peasant women’s stand for the lands and waters upon which they directly draw their independent subsistence (Blumberg et al. 2018; Gottlieb 2015). In September 2019 the Battery Wharf Hotel management rejected the UNITE HERE Boston Local 26 union-negotiated labor contract. In so doing, management rejected sexual assault prevention for workers in a high-risk industry. Those corporate bosses were willing to raise the risk of the sexual assault of employees and enable rape culture on their premises. In a 2018 survey, 95 percent of female workers at the Battery Wharf Hotel reported that they had experienced some form of sexual harassment at the hands of guests. Most common were guests answering the door while naked, or “flashing” or exposing their bodies while women staff were working in the room, with 52 percent experiencing this multiple times, and 81 percent experiencing it at least once (Rossman 2019a, 3). Even with ample evidence of the risks of the job, women workers at the Battery Wharf Hotel were asked to believe that corporate cost-cutting on panic buttons and rape whistles was just a smart business decision in a cutthroat economic climate. To the Battery Wharf shareholders, if you thought you could get away with that, to borrow the words of Greta Thunberg: “Shame on you.” UNITE HERE’s Local 26 not only campaigned for the safety of their own members, but also took on the problem of sex trafficking that affects millions of women and girls. Hotels are major through-ways for sex traffickers (Rossman 2019b). Best practices in prevention include training workers and staff on signs and remedial steps in cases of evidence of trafficking and other sex crimes. When hotel workers are made more vulnerable to similar crimes by the removal of protections, this sends a strong negative signal about the owners’ priorities with regard to the safety of their workers and their “guests”—some of whom might be there against their will. When workers are better equipped and more in control of their environments and their personal safety, they can also be more effective front-line advocates for the victims of sex trafficking and create a safer environment for all women. The slogans and demands of the multi-ethnic workforce of the Battery Wharf Hotel were exemplary of the ecofeminist politics of “unity in diversity” (Shiva 2019). Besides protections from sexual assault and strengthening the safety of workers and hotel visitors, the strikers’ demands included wage hikes and better health coverage for all, and specific protections from dis- crimination for immigrants and African American workers. The strikers’ infectious chant of “One Job Should Be Enough,” which echoed over Boston harbor for 11 weeks in 2019, is applicable to the whole global working class, paid and unpaid, in every sector today. 8 HOUSE ORGAN

In their unity the voices and demands of the most vulnerable workers were not mere union bargaining chips. Rather they brought people out to the picket line,10 and on 22 November 2019, won the strike.11 The Battery Wharf Hotel workers’ strike was not only a victory for workers in one localized labor dispute; it was also a victory of holding the line against the erosion of working standards, conditions, and protections in a city-wide and worldwide industry.

Conclusion The unique power of grassroots ecofeminist knowledge and social movements is not, per se, the sex and race or the “bare feet” of the activists, but rather their brilliant use of the capacity of people at the bottom of the hierarchy of labor power to unite every segment of the global working class above them, both waged and unwaged. Being at the “bottom” of the hierarchy of labor power does not automatically make one a revolutionary. But on the principle that people must lead themselves, and not be led by those “from outside” or “from above,” it is only in solidarity with the claims, demands, and movements of women of color that anyone else above them on the hierarchy of labor power can be sure that their activism is inclusive of the general class interest. So, when grassroots and Indigenous movements do actualize their unique capacity to catalyze the unity of all sections of the exploited class (for instance, in a coordinated producer-consumer strike), powerful global shifts can follow (Tobocman et al. 2004). Socialism is the antidote to capitalism. Yet if people’s socialism is not ecofeminist in character, then our eﬀorts in the years ahead will fall far short of our goals, like every other anti-colonial struggle that has seen its post-Inde- pendence socialistic plans derailed by global market pragmatism, and made vulnerable to the tightening grip of private and state investors and the over- whelming military might behind them (Bond 2005; Campbell 2003; Randall 2003). What has changed in 2020 is the maturing of a near-decade long re- awakening of progressive labor and activist cultures and demands, in social movements like Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, #SayHerName, and

10Including teachers’ unions, students, politicians, and the British musician Billy Bragg, who sang a set of union songs under a statue of Paul Revere. “The British are coming,” he declared, “with solidarity!” 11

The sexual harassment and sexual assault protections built into the contract include panic buttons for hotel workers, UNITE HERE Secretary-Treasurer Carlos Aromayo told WBZ NewsRa- dio’s Karyn Regal. ‘We have language now that gets panic buttons, it gets workers to not have to work with guests that they feel are inappropriate, and frankly, if the situation gets serious enough, guests can be banned from the property.’ (Regal 2019) These stipulations deepen protections against sexual violence by building workers’ freedom and agency to hold oﬀending guests accountable for their actions (see Bragg 2019, on accountability as a key dimen- sion of freedom). CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 9

#NeverAgain. The ground has shifted. Reviewing Peter Linebaugh’s Red Round Globe Hot Burning (2019), John Clark (2020, 26) points out that

We have gone through two world-historical revolutions (the agricultural and the industrial) as the objects of world historical developments. We are now faced with the challenge of fundamentally changing the course of world history for the first time through conscious human activity, that is, as agents of universal revolution. Today’s popular movements have put the interests and demands of the most vulnerable at the forefront and begun to mainstream demands for “system change not climate change.” We can see this in part in the growing public thirst for knowledge about workable alternatives to capitalism, as well as in the anti-capitalist uprisings in more than a dozen countries from France to Iraq to Hong Kong to Chile. Sexism and racism are the blunt instruments that maintain the divisions and hierarchies required to keep alive capital’s exploitation of labor and nature. Humanity also faces an existential threat in the form of rapidly unfold- ing climate crises, generated by the same capitalist hierarchy. Overcoming climate chaos means overcoming capitalism; and overcoming capitalism means uniting the exploited class to realize and universalize alternative political economies and means of life. Waged and unwaged Indigenous women and women of color who struggle to create, defend, and elaborate new and already-existing solutions to the economic, social, and ecological problems wrought by capitalism are uniquely capable of forging class unity. Peasant-, Indigenous-, and women of color-led movements have never been limited to protecting their own rights and interests. Their struggles and demands are also about the human rights and natural and civil commons that impact us all. They concern the air we breathe and the well-being of the planet’s atmosphere, from Nigerian women’s 1998 “gift to humanity” in their struggle to close down natural gas flares to reduce global emissions; to the Indigenous “Sky Defenders,” who oppose carbon colonialism (Indigenous Environmental Network n.d.; Turner and Brownhill 2004, 2007). These elder-led peaceful protest movements have set the stage for the children-led climate strikes that are now sweeping the world. At Standing Rock in 2016, gendered-ethnicized class alliances formed to protect not only the waters and lands of one group of people, but the environment and drinking water of millions of non-Indigenous people downstream. Teachers’ and airline workers’ struggles for better working conditions also explicitly benefit the families and travellers whom they serve in their work. Schools and airports, malls and parks, religious houses and pubs, together constitute some of our most important “industrialized society commons.” The youth-led anti-gun-violence movement seeks to make these commons and all places free from the threat of firearms. In 2019, elite students from 10 HOUSE ORGAN

Harvard and Yale disrupted an on-air college football game to occupy the field and demand climate justice, debt forgiveness, and divestment from fossil fuels. If the “independent subsistence” that is universally valued by Indigenous peoples and peasant women over and above the value of money does not ring true as part of your “feminism” or your “socialism,” then can you kindly please check your bias12 and your history, and reconsider who, in what geographies, are currently best equipped to break free and live outside of capitalism’s commodity value chains, or are already doing so (Saul 2018)?13 We don’t all need to herd goats in the desert. Though admittedly, if push came to shove, it would be handy to be able to do just that.14 Whatever their field or expertise, those who work to overcome capitalism and build socialism can strengthen their efforts if they “walk left”15 and get on board with the demands of Indigenous goat herders and their grassroots ecofeminist colleagues who are mobilizing in social movements around the world. For in their resilient life-oriented principles, knowledge, already-existing commons, and “use value chains,” and in the global class unity that they are uniquely able to ferment, lie the tools and horizontal social relations indis- pensable to the building of a post-capitalist future for all.

Postscript 13 December 2019: Ecosocialist ecofeminism is not only an obvious alternative to neoliberal capitalism; it is also an alternative for socialists, as well as other progressive leftists who have been disillusioned by the electoral ascen- dency of the far right in Brazil, Bolivia, the Philippines, Poland, the U.S.A., U.K., and elsewhere around the world. In the absence of a popular socialism of radical solidarity, such as the ecofeminist ecosocialism described here, the legions of disappointed activists of the world may instead turn to apathy, or

12Some socialists subscribe to a stages of growth-type linear vision of the development of communism out of the mobilizations, unions, and parties of the waged workers, foreseeing highly industrialized workers as “leaders” of the exploited. Others have expressed wariness at the stereotypical “conservatism” of rural peoples, whether in peasant or industrialized societies. On the contrary, groups like Red Nation declared themselves a “queer Indigenous feminist organization” committed to “defend and elevate the voices of women, femmes, and LGBTQ2+” (Red Nation 2019a). The Poor Peoples’ Campaign’s Declaration of Fun- damental Rights and Poor People’s Moral Agenda, calls for the “equality and the safety of all persons regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity” (https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/ demands/). See also McNeil-Seymour (2017)on“Two-Spirit Resistance.” 13See also Red Nation’s declaration: Socialism aligns with Indigenous traditions of relationality as we seek to be good relatives to other humans and other-than-humans. Socialism is the natural state of humanity, to live and work towards peace and justice. Communism is the greatest expression of love for the people and our nonhuman relatives. And it is the only solution for a planet on the brink of destruction at the hands of the ruling bourgeoisie and their backwards ideologies and insti- tutions. (Red Nation 2019b) 14A planned upcoming issue of Capitalism Nature Socialism speciﬁcally problematizes the relations of humans to other-than-humans under capitalism, mainly from vegan perspectives. 15Employing a useful analogy, Bond (2005) criticizes those activists and politicians who “talk left and walk right.” CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 11 towards left libertarianism (as in the U.S., with its adherence to gun rights enshrined in the Second Amendment), or jump directly into the right wing. Avoiding these detrimental outcomes is among the most consequential imperatives of ecofeminism today.

Acknowledgements Thanks are due to Ana Isla, Danny Faber, Adi Forkasiewicz, saed, Lutie Saul, and Quincy Saul for helpful feedback and comments on earlier drafts. Responsibility for all errors and omissions is of course ours.

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