1 Climate Change and the Ecology of the Political

Home , A Separation, Green theory, Heartland Institute, My Conception, No Logo, Skeptical Science

Climate Change and the Ecology of the Political: Crisis, Hegemony, and the Struggle for Climate Justice

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Reed Michael Kurtz

Graduate Program in Political Science The Ohio State University

2019

Dissertation Committee

Alexander Wendt, Co-Advisor Joel Wainwright, Co-Advisor Jason Moore Alexander Thompson Inés Valdez

Copyrighted by

Reed Michael Kurtz

2019

Abstract

This dissertation project responds to the global ecological crisis of climate change, showing how the temporal and spatial dimensions of the crisis challenge our capacities to imagine and implement effective political solutions. Rather than being natural limits, I argue these dimensions of the crisis are inherently social and political, derived from contradictions and antagonisms of the global capitalist nation-state system. I thus take a critical approach to ecology and politics, in the tradition of Marxist political ecology. I read Antonio Gramsci’s political theories of hegemony and the integral state through an ecological framework that foregrounds the distinct roles that human labor, capital, and the state system play in organizing social and environmental relations. I develop an original conception of hegemony as a fundamentally ecological process that constitutes the reproduction of human relations within nature, which I use to analyze the politics of climate governance and climate justice. Grounded in textual analysis and fieldwork observations of state and civil society relations within the UNFCCC, I show that struggles for hegemony among competing coalitions of state and non-state actors have shaped the institutional frameworks and political commitments of the Paris climate regime complex. I demonstrate how climate governance reproduces capitalist political relations predicated on formal separation of ‘state’ and ‘civil society,’ and the endless accumulation of capital, thereby serving to reproduce, rather than resolve, the

ii contradictions of the crisis. I then center my focus on the global movement of movements for climate justice. Using textual analysis and qualitative fieldwork conducted as a critically-situated, participant-observer of the climate justice movement at various sites, including the COP22 and COP23 climate negotiations, I show how the climate justice movement constitutes itself as a distinctly anti-systemic and ecological historical bloc in world politics. I demonstrate how ecological direct action is central to the movement’s efforts to achieve “system change, not climate change,” by working to reorganize the reproduction of relations between humans and the rest of nature along direct democratic lines.

iii

Dedication

To my family, especially Maca, Robyn, Greg, Karl, Anna, and Puma and Luna

Acknowledgments

There are a great number of people to whom I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude for contributing, in one way or another, to the production of this dissertation. First, I wish to thank my dissertation co-advisers and committee members Alex Wendt, Joel

Wainwright, Alex Thompson, Inés Valdez, and Jason Moore for their invaluable support and guidance throughout this process and its culmination. I would also like to thank

Jennifer Mitzen, Mike Neblo, Ben McKean, Chris Gelpi, William Minozzi, Amanda

Robinson, Daniel Verdier, Rick Herrmann, Mat Coleman, Kendra McSweeney, Courtney

Sanders, Melodie McGrothers, Cathy Becker, and Jessica Riviere for their contributions at various points throughout my career at Ohio State.

Special thanks are due to Drew Rosenberg, Avery White, Anna Meyerrose,

Austin Knuppe, José Fortou, Kailash Srinivasan, Matt Soener, Dan Silverman, Corey

Katz, Henry Peller, Guillermo Bervejillo, Patrick Cleary, Kyle Larson, Iku Yoshimoto,

Ruthie Pertsis, Leyla Tosun, Lauren Muscott, Ben Kenzer, Dan Kent, Liwu Gan, Greg

Smith, Linnea Turco, Krista Benson, Maria Fredericks; Alec Clott, Jared Edgerton, Grant

Sharratt, Vlad Chlouba, Jon Green, and Andy Goodhart for their friendship and support at

Ohio State. I would also like to thank discussants and other participants in workshops and other venues where I presented earlier versions of this work, including OSU’s Political

Theory and Research in International Politics workshops. Chapters 2 and 5 in particular were developed out of papers presented in these fora, respectively.

Colleagues and friends at other institutions, including but not limited to Kevin

Funk, Mauro Caraccioli, Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Goodhart, Jason Keiber, Marcus

Green, Naeem Inayatullah, Kevin Surprise, Harry van der Linden, Jay Bolthouse, Aaron

Vansintjan, Raúl Pacheco-Vega, Kiran Asher, Naty Gandara, Victor Salinas, Alfred

Hinrichson, Nico Gorigoitia, Daniel Hartley, Richard Widick, John Foran, Elisabeth

Ellis, Brooke Ackerley, Matthew Paterson, Mike Barnett, Mark Salter, Libby Anker,

Loubna El Amine, Ian Manners, Jeff Payne, and Craig Auchter, have also contributed valuable insights into my work and our profession. I am very grateful for their time and consideration at this early stage of my career. I would also like to thank those panelists, discussants, and other contributors who provided insightful feedback at conference sessions and workshops where earlier versions of my work (Chapters 2 and 5 in particular) were presented, including annual meetings of the American Association of

Geographers (2018, 2016), International Studies Association (2018, 2017) and ISA-NE

(2015), the American Political Science Association (2018), and the World-Ecology

Research Network (2015), Association for Political Theory (2016), and Western Political

Science Association (2019).

I also owe a great deal of thanks to a number of contributors whom I met in the field while doing fieldwork at the 2016 COP22 and 2017 COP23 climate meetings in

Marrakech and Bonn, the 2017 People’s Climate March in Washington, DC, and community activists and organizers here in central and southeastern Ohio during my time

vi here at OSU. I would like to thank a number of people, including but not limited to: Tati

Shauro; Carmen Capriles; Tadzio Müller; Ruth Nyambura; Nathan Thanki; Noah

Goodwin; Garrett Blad; Lucile Daumas; Remy Franklin; Noëlie Audi-Dor; Michel Le

Gendre; Morgan Curtis; Antonio Zambrano; Kevin Buckland; Pascoe Sabido; Kailea

Frederick; Paul Getsos; Aura Vasquez; Mathias Bouuaert; Angus Joseph; Amalen

Sathananthar; Collin Rees; Kjell Kühne; João Alves; Ben Goloff; Juan Reardon; Alex

Carlin; Lidy Nacpil; Kayla DeVault; Devi Lockwood; Michael Charles; Dineen

O’Rourke; Bader Rachidi; Hamza Akhouch; Otman Basahbi; Katja Garson; Tetet Nera-

Lauron; Lainie Rini; Kenny Myers; Becca Pollard; Matt Myers; Emma Schurink;

Megumi Endo; Shradha Shreejaya; Naveeda Khan; Frida Kieninger; Heather Doyle;

Michaela Mujica-Steiner; Karina Gonzalez; Ryan Camero; Eva Malis; Troy Robertson;

Amelia Diehl; Varshini Prakash; Kyle Lemle; Bean Crane; Andrea Schmid; Jawad

Nostakbal; Nadir Bouhmouch; Nadja Charaby; Max Högl; Caitlyn McDaniel; Yuki

Kidokoro; Sondra Youdelman; and Melinda Tuhus. I have truly learned so much from you all, and this project has been profoundly shaped by my experiences in the field working alongside you. I hope that this project can contribute in some small way to giving back and working towards our shared goals of realizing climate justice and system change not climate change.

I dedicate this dissertation to my family, especially Greg, Robyn, Karl, Anna, and

Maca. Without their unwavering love and support, I cannot imagine how I would have come this far. And because my dissertation is ultimately about human and non-human relations in nature, I must also recognize the contributions of my two feline companions

vii throughout this journey, Puma and Luna. Together, more than anyone else, those two have spent more hours with me as I write these pages.

viii

Vita

2005-2009...... B.A., Butler University

2013-2015...... M.A., Political Science, The Ohio State University

2015-2019...... PhD Candidate, Political Science, The Ohio State University

Fields of Study

Major Field: Political Science

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii Dedication ...... iv Acknowledgments...... v Vita ...... ix List of Tables ...... xiii Preface. Welcome to the Anthropocene; Or, the Planetary Ecological Crisis of Capitalism ...... xiv Chapter 1. Introduction ...... 1 1.1...... 1 2.1...... 14 3.1...... 23 Part I: Theorizing the Politics of Climate Change ...... 38 Chapter 2. Contending Conceptions of the Climate Crisis: Moderate, Radical, and Marxist Perspectives on the Politics of Climate Change ...... 39 2.1. Introduction ...... 39 2.2. The Politicization Debate: Moderate and Radical Perspectives on the Nature of Climate Politics ...... 42 2.3. The Limits of Moderate and Radical Approaches: A Marxist Critique...... 57 2.4. Radical Ecology, Political Ecology, Ecosocialism: For Marxist Ecology...... 60 2.5. Marxist Critique(s) of the Capitalist Climate Crisis ...... 74 2.5.1 Marxist Critique of Capitalist Political Economy ...... 74 2.5.2. Marxist Critique of Capitalist Political Ecology ...... 83 2.5. Conclusion: Towards Hegemony as an Ecological Relation ...... 106 Chapter 3. Hegemony, Labor, and the Metabolism of Nature: Gramsci and the Ecology of the Political ...... 110 3.1. Introduction ...... 110 x

3.2. Gramsci, Politics, Science...... 116 3.2.1 On Gramsci and Neo-Gramscianism ...... 116 3.2.2. Man and Nature, Conceptions of the World, Philosophy of Praxis ...... 122 3.2.3. Political Science, Hegemony, and the Integral State ...... 131 3.3 Hegemony and the Metabolism of Nature ...... 141 3.4. Labor, Direct Action, and the Political Organization of the Metabolic Relations Between Humans and Nature ...... 164 3.5. Conclusion ...... 176 Part II – The Political Praxis of Climate Change: Climate Governance vs. Climate Justice ...... 181 Chapter 4. Grounding the State and Civil Society in Global Climate Politics: Climate Governance and the Separation of the Political ...... 182 4.1. Introduction: Climate Governance as Systemic Movement of Capitalist Climate Crisis ...... 182 4.2. The Nature of Climate Governance ...... 189 4.3. Climate Blocs in World Politics ...... 200 4.3.1. Green Capital Bloc ...... 201 4.3.2. Fossil Capital Bloc ...... 206 4.3.3. Developing Capital Bloc ...... 208 4.3.4. Climate Justice Bloc ...... 211 4.4. Climate Blocs in Climate Governance ...... 214 4.4.1. Formal Separation of State and Civil Society in the UNFCCC ...... 215 4.4.2. Subsumption of the Earth System to Capital in the Paris Agreement and IPCC ...... 218 4.5. Conclusion: Climate Governance as the Planetarization of the Capitalist Nation- State System ...... 221 Chapter 5. Ecology, Hegemony, and the Struggle for Climate Justice: Political Praxis of the Climate Justice Movement ...... 224 5.1. Introduction ...... 224 5.2. Climate Justice as Antisystemic Movement ...... 235 5.3. Ecological Hegemony and the Political Praxis of Climate Justice: A Gramscian Framework ...... 250 5.4. Methods and Fieldwork ...... 257 5.5. Political Praxis of Climate Justice at the COP23 in Bonn 2017 ...... 265 5.5.1 Praxis A: Organizing and Planning...... 267 xi

5.5.2. Praxis B: Discourse and Communications ...... 269 5.5.3. Praxis C: Lobbying and Orderly Political Force ...... 271 5.5.4. Praxis D: Direct Action and Disorderly Political Force ...... 274 5.6. Conclusion ...... 279 Conclusion – What Future(s) for Climate Justice? ...... 282 Works Cited ...... 292

xii

List of Tables

Table 1: Contributions to Marxist Ecology ...... 102 Table 2: Key features of Climate Blocs in Global Climate Governance ...... 213 Table 3: Hegemonic Political Praxis...... 256 Table 4. Key Climate Justice Movement organizations and features at COP23 ...... 262 Table 5. Political Praxis of the Climate Justice Movement ...... 267

xiii

Preface. Welcome to the Anthropocene; Or, the Planetary Ecological Crisis of Capitalism

“That things are status quo is the catastrophe.” – Walter Benjamin1

Inseguridad es no saber si hay para comer [Insecurity is not knowing whether there is (enough) food to eat] – Anonymous

It has been said that there is a paradoxical nature to a preface: that, despite being located at the beginning of the manuscript, it can only truly come about through the end of the project which it begins.2 Something similar might be said for our planetary ecological crisis, the nature of which is such that it may literally spell the end of life on this Earth as we know it. Our planet is currently in the midst of the ‘sixth great extinction’ of life. This is an unremarkable fact from the vantage point of Earth history.

But what makes this, the sixth great extinction qualitatively distinct from those prior extinction events is the fact that, for the first time in history as such, this extinction event is being subjectively perceived not merely by those forms of life that are suffering or enduring it, but indeed by the very life forms of which we can attribute responsibility, agency, or authority in causing it. That is, what makes this extinction event qualitatively

1 The full aphorism is as follows: “The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are “status quo” is the catastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility but what in each case is given. Strindberg's idea: hell is not something that awaits us, but this life here and now” (Benjamin 2003). Of course, this was written amid the rise of fascism and the disintegration of German society – and yet it remains equally applicable to the conscious experience of so many living beings today under the socio- ecological crises of global capitalism and the ongoing Sixth Great Extinction. 2 See Gayatri Spivak’s influential “Translator’s Preface” to Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1976). xiv distinct from these prior, natural events in Earth history are its social dimensions or drivers: the global ecological crisis we are experiencing is being driven by so-called

‘anthropogenic’ forces. What makes the crisis different this time is precisely the fact that

‘we’ – humans in nature, nature literally recognizing itself as such – are its subjects. And this planetary ecological crisis – unlike any other crisis ‘we’ have experienced in ‘our’ history as a species on this planet – could quite literally spell the end of life on this Earth as we have known it for practically all of what we might call ‘human history.’ That is, the implications for this crisis for those complex and differentiated totalities we call

“humanity” and “life on Earth” may be literally existential, in senses both symbolic/philosophical (ie calling into question just “who” precisely “we” are in relation to the rest of the world) and material (ie spelling the terminal decline of certain forms of life, including that of many humans). And so we begin, with the end of life on Earth as such.3

Or such we might say is one version of the “Anthropocene thesis” and its many variants that have been circulating among scientific and critical discourses on the relations between humans and the Earth since the turn of the century. The Anthropocene

Working Group of the Subcommission on Quarternary Stratigraphy, a leading scientific authority on the Earth sciences,4 notes that

Phenomena associated with the Anthropocene include: an order-of- magnitude increase in erosion and sediment transport associated with urbanization and agriculture; marked and abrupt anthropogenic perturbations of the cycles of elements such as carbon, nitrogen,

3 For more on the Sixth Great Extinction, see e.g. Kolbert 2014 and Ceballos et al 2015. 4 “The Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) is a constituent body of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), the largest scientific organisation within the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS).” http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/working-groups/anthropocene/ xv

phosphorus and various metals together with new chemical compounds; environmental changes generated by these perturbations, including global warming, sea-level rise, ocean acidification and spreading oceanic ‘dead zones’; rapid changes in the biosphere both on land and in the sea, as a result of habitat loss, predation, explosion of domestic animal populations and species invasions; and the proliferation and global dispersion of many new ‘minerals’ and ‘rocks’ including concrete, fly ash and plastics, and the myriad ‘technofossils’ produced from these and other materials. (Zalasiewicz, et al 2019)

In this thesis, I contend that growing awareness of climate change and the severity of its effects on a global scale are challenging our hegemonic conceptions of the world. In the

Earth and natural sciences, we see scholars who are re-evaluating how we should understand the temporal specificity of our present geological epoch. The

“Anthropocene” is one of the names for the new geological epoch of Earth history under consideration, a term that is intended to reflect the extent to which the cumulative effects of ‘human activity’ make our current state of the world separate from that which defined the lives of our ancestors. Whereas the Holocene was previously understood as the

(relatively) stable set of geological and atmospheric conditions that had defined human

(as opposed to Earth) history, from the present day until back approximately 14,000 years ago (with the rise of civilizations and the first recorded history), current rates and conditions of climate change, deforestation, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, and other changes in the global environment are now seen as defining this current “Age of

Man.” The strongest debates among the Earth Sciences literatures concern less whether contemporary conditions constitute a new period in Earth’s history, but rather how and when this onset should be appropriately dated. The original date proposed in the famous article by Crutzen and Stoermer (2000) dated to the onset of the Industrial Revolution, xvi but estimates have ranged all the way back to the onset of agriculture 10-12,000 years ago (thus placing the start of the Anthropocene shortly after the first permanent establishments of human civilization, and the earliest rise of the state form), or pre- industrial conditions including the “Little Ice Age,” which some historical climatologists believe is linked (at least in part) to the reforestation of the Americas, due to the genocide of the Native Americans amid the bio-geographical “Columbian Exchange. ” However, as of the release of the binding vote by the Anthropocene Working Group on 21 May

2019, the choice of “stratigraphic signals around the mid-twentieth century of the

Common Era,” including but not limited to the detection of nuclear isotopes from the onset of the Atomic Age and other ecological effects of the Great Acceleration and expansion of the world economy in the wake of WWII, will guide subsequent analysis of the working group.

But it is not merely the natural sciences that are being confronted by the climate crisis. Social historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has observed that climate change pushes the absolute limits of our human capacity for historical thinking and imagination, which has profound implications for how we understand our relations in time and space. The

Anthropocene simultaneously invokes spatial and temporal dimensions which cross the scalar dynamics of the Earth as a planetary system, the historical geography of homo sapiens, and the (comparatively recent) rise of a distinctly capitalist civilization – only the last of which has been traditionally considered “historical” in the sense commonly understood by actually-practicing historians, and none of which can be directly

xvii apprehended in its “totality” as an object of experience.5 The depth of the crisis thus invokes equally profound philosophical reflections, with some environmental philosophers suggesting that coming to terms with the Anthropocene means addressing that most fundamental (and universal) philosophical question of all: what it means to live and to die only this time at the level of our species-being.6

The potential implications for this are profound and far-reaching, and call into question some of the deepest assumptions about the relations between humans and nature on this Earth. No longer the passive backdrop on which the human drama of politics and history unfolds, the nature of our relations with our natural environment, the Earth, and nature itself have been summoned to the foreground, with politicians, journalists, academics, and other observers debating its potential implications. Can this increased awareness of our role in this crisis provide a way out? Perhaps it is only by coming to terms with the limits of our “human nature” that we can tame our worst impulses and establish and implement the necessary Earth system governance structures to “navigate” our way through this crisis?

But just “who” or “what” is actually responsible for causing the crisis? And how does our conceptualization of the “problem” at the heart of the crisis shape the political project(s) for resolving it? Does the (abstract and essentialized) “human nature” represented in the Anthropos- adequately capture the relations at the heart of the crisis, or does it actually obscure more than it reveals? In other words, perhaps the more adequate

5 See Chakrabarty 2009, 2015. 6 See, e.g.: Jamieson 2014; Scranton 2015. xviii conceptualization of our world-ecological epoch is not that of the Anthropocene, but rather the Capitalocene (“an ugly word for an ugly system” [Moore, ed 2016: 5]). I offer this dissertation as a modest contribution towards our understanding of the nature of the crisis, particularly regarding the role that politics plays in organizing our relations within nature, towards the end of changing it.

xix

Chapter 1. Introduction

1.1.

On December 12, 2015, the Paris Agreement (PA) was signed at the 21st

Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on

Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Paris, France, opening a new period in global climate politics. This “historic” and “unprecedented success” in Paris marked the culmination of a process dating back to at least the “historic failure” of the 2009 negotiations at the

COP15 in Copenhagen.7 In sharp contrast to Copenhagen, where negotiations collapsed without realizing a successor to the expiring Kyoto Protocol,8 Paris was marked by

“unprecedented cooperation” among a record number of states for an international climate agreement (Selin and Najam 2015). A strong signal for cooperation among the two largest emitters came almost a year ahead of the Paris conference when the United

States and China, led by their respective heads of state Barack Obama and Xi Jinping, reached an agreement on mutual emissions commitments in an important precursor to the

7 For the full text of the Paris Agreement, see UNFCCC 2016. For more on Paris as a “success” in contrast to the “failure” of Copenhagen, see e.g. McGregor 2014; NCD Alliance 2015; Harvey 2015; von Storch 2015. 8 The Kyoto Protocol (KP) was established at COP3 in 1998 with its first period set to expire by 2009, which thus set the stakes for Copenhagen’s COP15, which was intended to negotiate the KP’s successor. Of course, the KP was itself a crippled institution, hamstrung by the US’s non-participation (codified via the Byrd-Hagel Resolution [US Senate 1997]) and slow implementation by heavy emitting states like Canada, Australia, and Russia. Together these only added to the significance of the Copenhagen negotiations, and the weight of their collapse. 1 formal negotiations in December 2015 (Taylor and Branigan 2014).9 Paris’s subsequent ratification was hailed as a record time for an international agreement of such great scope and scale, with formal ratification taking place just a few days prior to the following

COP22 in Marrakech in 2016 (EDF 2016). The timing also happened to coincide with

2016 general and presidential elections in the United States, as election day (Tuesday

Nov. 4) overlapped with Day Two of the COP22. These auspicious early signs surrounding the Paris Framework were dashed by Day Three of the Marrakech conference, with the election of US President Donald Trump (Mathiesen 2016; Vidal

2016; Vidal and Millman 2016).

Looking at the key features of the Paris Framework, three characteristics distinguish it from previous regimes (including the Kyoto Protocol). The first is its formal commitment to scientifically-informed mitigation targets at a global scale, i.e. the 1.5 and

2 °C warming targets. In the language of the Paris Agreement,

Emphasizing with serious concern the urgent need to address the significant gap between the aggregate effect of Parties’ mitigation pledges in terms of global annual emissions of greenhouse gases by 2020 and aggregate emission pathways consistent with holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre- industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre- industrial levels,” (UNFCCC 2016).10

The second distinguishing feature is its so-called “bottom-up approach” which reorganizes global climate governance relations across scale. In contrast to the “top-down

9 The lack of binding emissions reductions commitments for large, developing-world emitters like China was given as the crucial reason for US non-ratification of the Kyoto Protocol in the bipartisan Byrd-Hagel Resolution, which passed 99-0 in the Senate, despite US Vice President Al Gore’s central role in its negotiation (US Senate 1997). 10 For more on the 1.5 and 2 °C warming targets, see Carbon Brief 2014 and The Guardian 2018. 2 approach” characteristic of the Kyoto Framework, whereby binding mitigation targets are determined at a global level and obligations for meeting them are channeled ‘downward’ onto participating states, with Paris we see countries voluntarily submit their “Nationally

Determined Contributions” (NDCs)11 such that the responsibilities for meeting the global cumulative target are transmitted ‘upward.’ That is, under the terms of the Paris

Agreement each individual nation-state is tasked with determining its own mitigation targets and means of implementation without any binding enforcement mechanism at the global level. The primary process by which implementation is intended to take place and scale up over time is called the “ratchet” or “ambition” mechanism. The PA implementation process is divided into at least four main stages. First, countries have submitted their initial NDCs to set the baseline commitment level, which was integral to ratification.12 Next, the ‘ratcheting’ is intended to commence as countries began the

“facilitative dialogue,” or what is now known as the “Talanoa Dialogue,”13 as countries

11 In the Paris Agreement, NDCs are referred to as “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” (INDCs), to emphasize their ambitious character (see UNFCCC 2016, II). I will use NDC and INDC interchangeably. 12 Ratification required NDCs from at least 55 Parties representing 55% of total greenhouse gas emissions, after which the PA entered into force on November 4, 2016. As of March 15, 2019, 185 of the 197 Parties to the UNFCCC have ratified the PA, representing approximately 90% of global emissions (see UNFCCC 2019; Climate Analytics 2018). This total includes the participation of the United States, despite the Trump Administration’s intent to withdraw, as according to formal procedures for withdrawal defined in Article 28 of the Paris Agreement. 13 "Talanoa is a traditional word used in Fiji and across the Pacific to reflect a process of inclusive, participatory and transparent dialogue. The purpose of Talanoa is to share stories, build empathy and to make wise decisions for the collective good. The process of Talanoa involves the sharing of ideas, skills and experience through storytelling... participants build trust and advance knowledge through empathy and understanding. Blaming others and making critical observations are inconsistent with building mutual trust and respect, and therefore inconsistent with the Talanoa concept. Talanoa fosters stability and inclusiveness in dialogue, by creating a safe space that embraces mutual respect for a platform for decision making for a greater good” (UNFCCC 2018). While the “facilitative dialogue” is the original language used in the Paris text, the shift towards the Talanoa framing reflects the leadership of the Fijian presidency at the COP23 in Bonn 2017. 3 share and communicate their pledged emissions reductions commitments and evaluate their performance in light of the long-term goals of the Agreement. After this process of evaluation and dialogue, which is currently ongoing, countries must then update or communicate a new NDC by 2020. This timeline corresponds with a five year process cycle, with the purpose being that countries’ submissions will “represent a progression over time” and reflect their “highest possible ambition” (UNFCCC 2016). The fourth stage of the process will take place in 2023, ahead of the third round of NDC submissions, in what is known as the “Global Stocktake.” The Global Stocktake is intended to build upon the Facilitative/Talanoa Dialogue and assess the performance, progress, and long-term prospects for the PA and the respective commitments, including not just mitigation but adaptation, climate finance, and technology development and transfer. The process is then intended to repeat itself, hewing to the five year cycle structure at a minimum while at the same time increasing ambition and commitments

(Carbon Brief 2016). In contrast, Kyoto was divided into two major periods, with the first period (2008-2012) setting binding mitigation targets for developed states (so-called

Annex I countries), while a new set of targets among a new set of Annex I countries were developed as part of the second period (2013-2020) as part of the Doha Amendment to the KP (UNFCCC 1998; UNFCCC N.D.). The lack of binding emissions reductions commitments for large developing countries, like India and China who today are among the largest emitters of GHGs in the world, as well as the non-participation of major actors

4 like the US (and foot dragging by Russia, Canada, and Australia), were given as major reasons for the restructuring of the Paris Agreement as a bottom-up model.14

The third and related factor of the Paris Framework is the increasingly significant role, and diversity of actors, for state and non-state political authority and action at scales other than the nation-state (or “national state”).15 This includes increasing recognition and roles for state authorities at various scales, including municipalities, states or provinces in federal systems, and transnational authorities like the European Union.16 But this also includes other, non-state actors, including those formally represented within the constituency groups of Civil Society Observer Organizations, such as the non- governmental organizations associated with the Climate Action Network (CAN).

Formally, this is recognized in the Paris Agreement through the Non-State Actor Zone

(NAZCA) where “non-Party stakeholders,” including “civil society, the private sector, financial institutions, cities and other subnational authorities,” are invited to “scale up their efforts and support actions to reduce emissions and/or build resilience and decrease vulnerability to the adverse effects of climate change” (UNFCCC 2016: 17).17 Thus, just

14 Compare UNFCCC 2016 with UNFCCC 1998. 15 See, for example, the 2017 symposium on “Non-State Actors in the New Landscape of International Climate Cooperation” in Environmental Politics (Volume 26, Issue 4). See also: Hale 2016; Rietig 2016. 16 Not only do subnational political authorities have formal representation independent of their respective nation-states through the Local Government and Municipal Authorities (LGMA) constituency group (UNFCCC 2011), they are increasingly asserting their roles independently and sometimes in direct opposition of their national state. One such example is the America’s Pledge coalition in the United States, which includes municipal authorities (like the city of Pittsburgh) and states (like California) that are organizing to meet the US’s commitment to the Paris Agreement, despite the Trump Administration’s commitment to withdraw from the Paris Agreement (UNFCCC 2017). For more on the America’s Pledge coalition, see https://www.americaspledgeonclimate.com/ 17 See also: http://climateaction.unfccc.int/ 5 as the responsibilities for confronting the 1.5 and 2 °C degree targets are voluntarily channeled upward, civil society actors are seen as necessary for meeting those targets.

Civil society and non-state actors have played important roles in the Paris process and the development of these three key features (CDC Climat Research 2015; Jacobs

2016). Not just climate scientists associated with the IPCC but indigenous organizations and others representing frontline communities campaigned hard, together with leadership from developing world coalitions such as the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), to support adding the 1.5 °C language in order to protect those most vulnerable to a warming planet (Solomon 2015; Bolon 2018). Furthermore, the emphasis on voluntary participation by organizations and units across political scale is itself justified by claims and a general understanding that the collective participation by ‘all of us, together now’ – whether as individuals or as parts of larger collectives from community groups all the way up to transnational corporations – is necessary if not sufficient for tackling climate change (Bäckstrand et al 2017).

An emblematic example of this message of cooperation and collective action across scale came with the 2014 People’s Climate March, where approximately 300,000 people gathered in New York City (with another 300,000 more participating in

“companion demonstrations” worldwide) to “demand action” on climate change ahead of a UN climate summit one year in advance of COP21 in Paris. Organized by a variety of environmental NGOs including 350.org, the Sierra Club, and Climate Justice Alliance, and with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, former US Vice President Al Gore, NYC mayor Bill De Blasio, and Leonardo DiCaprio at the helm of the march, which was

6 further comprised of various segments representing frontline communities, scientists, and interfaith groups (among others), the event was hailed as the “biggest ever call-to-action on climate change” (Davey et al 2014). In the words of the People’s Climate March organization, “To change everything, we need everyone.”18

In the immediate wake of the signing and subsequent ratification of the Paris

Agreement, elite opinion was overwhelmingly positive and optimistic. Paris was highlighted as an important success, especially in the wake of Copenhagen, when global leaders (including a freshly elected Barack Obama) failed to negotiate a successor to the

Kyoto Protocol. Laurent Fabius, the French Foreign Minister who chaired the conference, upon gaveling the Agreement into effect noted that “It is my deep conviction that we have come up with an ambitious and balanced agreement” (qtd. in Goldenberg et al 2015). The Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, Christiana Figueres, tweeted that “I used to say: we must, we can, we will. Today we can say we did” (ibid.) US President

Barack Obama immediately hailed the deal as “ambitious,” “historic,” and “the best chance to save the one planet that we’ve got,” even if it was not “perfect” (BBC 2015).

Obama also added that the Paris Agreement “establishes the enduring framework the world needs to solve the climate crisis” by creating “the mechanism, the architecture, for us to continue to tack this problem in an effective way,” and that, in doing so, “the

American people can be proud, because this historic agreement is a tribute to American leadership” (Pengelly 2015). Even the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) Group, who

18 For more on the People’s Climate Movement (PCM) organization, see https://peoplesclimate.org/. For a more critical perspective of the 2014 march, see Mann and Wainwright 2018: 157-160. 7 have historically been very critical of the climate negotiations, praised the Paris

Agreement, as LDC Chair Giza Gaspar Martins noted that “Nothing that has gone before compares to this historic, legally binding climate agreement… It is the best outcome that we could have hoped for, not just for the Least Developed Countries, but for all citizens of the world” (LDC Group 2015). Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, “climate justice has won” (Times of India 2015).

Most reactions represented in Western media were similarly enthusiastic, emphasizing an overwhelmingly positive response from the international community, and highlighting in particular the “historic” nature of the Agreement (see, e.g. Vidal,

Goldenberg, and Taylor 2015; Warrick and Mooney 2015; Worland 2015). In an analysis for The Washington Post, environment reporter Chris Mooney wrote,

The word ‘historic,’ already being used to describe the just-accepted Paris climate agreement, is more than warranted. The world will now have a new and comprehensive regime in place to shape how its diverse nations go about the urgent task of reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. That’s why climate activists are ecstatic the world over right now. It’s a big deal. (2015, emphasis added)

Other journalists were even more effusive in their praise of the Agreement. A headline from The Guardian’s Fiona Harvey (2015) proclaimed, “Paris climate change agreement: the world’s greatest diplomatic success.” Another Guardian headline declared the Paris

Agreement as the “end of the fossil fuel era” (Goldenberg et al 2015). While there was much praise for the French leadership of the conference and the high levels of cooperation among developed and developing states, New York Magazine’s Jonathan

Chait singled out the role of Barack Obama, writing that “The Paris Climate Deal is

President Obama’s Biggest Accomplishment” (2015).

However, despite Mooney’s assertion that climate activists were “ecstatic” in response to Paris, a closer look at reactions from civil society reveals a much more complex set of responses. Consider the series of statements from constituent organizations issued by the Climate Action Network (CAN), the largest NGO advocacy network on climate change in the world. Out of a total of 20 short statements posted to the CAN website immediately after the signing of the Paris Agreement (CAN 2015), half of them can be considered “positive” reactions, while seven were “mixed” and three were

“negative.”19 Almost all of the positive reactions shared similar characteristics to those from world leaders and media outlets, particularly by highlighting the “historic” nature of the Agreement as a universal commitment to combatting climate change. Several observers also emphasized the implications for renewable energy vs. the fossil fuel industry, like Greenpeace International’s Kumi Naidoo (Paris “puts the fossil fuel industry on the wrong side of history”) and Christian Aid’s Mohamed Adow (“the transition to a low carbon world is now inevitable”) (ibid.). Importantly, multiple statements used the global commitment seen in Paris as an opportunity to criticize a lack of ambition from their home country (ie New Zealand CAN’s David Tong) or developed countries in general (CAN South Asia’s Sanjay Vashist) (ibid.), which in turn reflects

19 I consider “positive” statements as those that contained more affirmative adjectives, like “historic” or “unprecedented,” and/or otherwise emphasized a more “optimistic” reading of events. “Negative statements, on the other hand, emphasized weaknesses or shortcomings of the Agreement. “Mixed” statements either contained roughly approximate elements of both, and/or took a more neutral position towards the Agreement, emphasizing continued actions going forward. 9

Paris’s perceived design strength as a bottom-up institutional structure in which pressure from civil society is intended as a key means of holding states to account.

Among the more mixed reactions from CAN members, Tearfund’s Paul Cook provides a representative account, highlighting both the progress that Paris represents, as well as the need for more action, including from civil society to “hold their governments to account”:

We welcome the agreement brokered at these crucial climate talks. This is a good step forward, but let’s not be complacent. This doesn’t give us everything we need - nations will need to go further in reducing their emissions over the next few years to ensure the global temperature does not rise by more than 1.5 degrees to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. What has been exciting is to see the growing movement these talks have fostered - people from all walks of life, including the church, have raised their voices for climate action here in Paris. We will not stop this momentum, but continue to hold governments to account, to help people across the world who are seeing the devastating daily impact of climate change. (ibid.)

In contrast to the more “welcoming” reactions cited above, the three more negative or critical accounts from CAN members share two key features. First, each focuses on particular weaknesses with the Paris Agreement: 350.org’s Bill McKibben notes that “the power of the fossil fuel industry is reflected in the text”; Oxfam’s Helen Szoke describes the deal as a “frayed life-line to the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people” that only gives a “vague promise of a new future climate funding target” without “forc[ing] countries to cut emissions fast enough to forestall a climate change catastrophe”; and

David Turnbull from Oil Change International calls the Paris negotiations “a lowest common denominator of global politics, not the aspirations of the global community”

(ibid.). In light of these weaknesses regarding the Paris Agreement’s (in)ability to

10 effectively address the climate crisis, these critics argue that it is up to “the climate movement” to provide the real solutions. According to Turnbull,

It’s the people on the streets who provide the real hope for addressing the climate crisis. People fighting for climate justice around the world are the ones who will solve this problem and they’re already making headway. This year, with wins over the Keystone XL pipeline and Arctic drilling, the climate movement has begun to show its true strength. It is by continuing these fights day in and day out, year in and year out, through the voice of a growing global movement that cannot and will not be silenced, that change will happen. (ibid.)

Certainly, thousands of these climate movement activists were present in Paris, taking part in the myriad activities and events in the designated “civil society spaces” throughout the city during the negotiations. And yet, the relations among these civil society actors as well as their relations with the negotiations and state authorities in Paris were more complex. These complex relations were reflected in not just the discourse and reactions surrounding the Paris conference, but the actions and participation in Paris

Framework-related activities and events by a “civil society” that cannot be reduced to those directly represented ‘inside’ the negotiations, including the Climate Action

Network organization. Indeed, in sharp contrast to the perspectives of not just most political leaders but many leading civil society organizations, a significant set of dissident voices within the broader climate movement have been more consistently critical of the entire UNFCCC process leading up to and including Paris. These actors have also experienced a much more conflictual (and at times violent) relationship with the political authorities in and around the climate conferences. The emergence of this more radical

11 wing of the climate movement and their antisystemic resistance to the formal politics of the UNFCCC can be traced at least as far back back to the COP15 in Copenhagen 2009.

Copenhagen marks an important chapter in the history of climate politics not just because of the spectacular collapse and failure of the formal negotiations discussed above, but also because it marked an equally critical chapter in the history of the global climate movement and the role of civil society in global climate politics. Perhaps more so than any other moment in the history of global climate politics, Copenhagen 2009 was marked by not only by a profound split in global civil society on climate change, as documented by Jennifer Hadden (2015) and others in the details surrounding the emergence of a separate and distinct convergence of civil society actors organizing under the banner of “climate justice.” Simultaneously, Copenhagen 2009 also saw a collision between this emergent climate justice contingent and the state authorities managing the conference, as COP15 saw the largest police action in country’s modern history, which in turn sparked a political crisis for the Danish government.20 Paris 2015 saw comparable levels of police activity and repression, including a declared state of emergency that restricted free association and movement across the French capital, and hundreds of arrests.21

Despite the rosy depictions and declarations by global elites and corporate media, this climate justice contingent did not see Paris as a success for the planet or its inhabitants. In fact, in sharp contrast to the more elite and mainstream opinion that

20 Levels of police violence and repression in Denmark were said to be the greatest since WWII. For more on this, see e.g. Pusey and Russell 2010; Fisher 2010; Rising Tide North America 2010; Bond 2012; Chatterton et al 2013; Featherstone 2013; Mason and Askins 2015. 21 For more on Paris’s état d’urgence, see e.g.: Democracy Now! 2015; Mann and Wainwright 2017: 160. 12 celebrated Paris as a triumph for global cooperation, many of these more radical activists and organizers chose to highlight Paris as yet another defeat in the struggle for a stronger commitment to mitigate and adapt to global warming. For many of these organizations, all that was needed was to highlight the persistent gap in the scientific projections versus the concrete actions and pledged ambitions of the planet’s political leaders to understand how and why Paris could be regarded as simply the latest failure in a long string of them.

These global political dynamics, in Paris and beyond, raise important questions at the heart of this dissertation. How are we to make sense of these political relations of governance and resistance in this time of planetary climate crisis? How can we make sense of the balance of forces among states and civil society in global climate politics?

What roles are state, capital, and social mobilization playing in shaping planetary political ecology? What are the dominant forms of climate politics that are emerging, and what implications do they have for our planetary future?

In this dissertation, I argue that global climate politics are being shaped by struggles for hegemony over the metabolic relations between humans and the Earth.

Drawing upon a Marxist ecological framework that I develop out of engagements with critical human geography and Gramscian international relations and political theory, I study the dialectical production of coercion and consent that organizes political relations between humans and nature in this age of planetary ecological crisis. I examine how global environmental politics of climate governance and climate justice are being shaped by hegemonic struggles among competing historical blocs in world politics. Among these is an emergent ‘movement of movements’ for climate and environmental justice

13 consisting of activists and organizations struggling for ‘system change not climate change’ across the world. I show how the UNFCCC and direct action resistance by the climate justice movement represent competing and contradictory means of resolving the global ecological crisis of capitalism and climate change, and in turn provide insights into our political future.

2.1.

In October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a special report (SR15) detailing the latest information regarding the status and projections to limit global warming below 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial temperatures, as according to the commitments and guidelines of the 2015 Paris Agreement.22 This is the first major report issued by the IPCC in the context of the Paris Regime, and the first since the IPCC’s last comprehensive Assessment Report, AR5. In line with the standards of the IPCC, SR15 contains no new or previously unpublished data relating to climate science per se, but rather compiles and documents a battery of important facts about the state of the world and future climate projections. Together these figures paint an alarming picture about a world-system that is on track for well beyond 1.5 to 2 degrees.

The full report is a sprawling series of hundreds of pages across five chapters, a technical summary, and supplementary materials, but the most important and widely-read

22 The full title of SR15 is Global Warming of 1.5 °C an IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty. Accessible here: http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/ 14 component is the 33-page Summary for Policymakers.23 The Executive Summary begins with an Introduction summarizing its purpose and mandate, as responding “to the invitation for the IPCC ‘… to provide a Special Report in 2018 on the impacts of global warming above 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emissions pathways’” in the Decision of the COP21 climate negotiations of the United

Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Paris, 2015. The

Introduction also includes a brief note about its use of confidence intervals to indicate levels of un/certainty around its findings, and acknowledges “knowledge gaps” that exist throughout the report.

The Executive Summary and Headline Statements are organized into four sections: “A. Understanding Global Warming of 1.5 °C”; “B. Projected Climate Change,

Potential Impacts and Associated Risks”; “C. Emissions Pathways and System

Transitions Consistent with 1.5 °C Global Warming”; and “D. Strengthening the Global

Response in the Context of Sustainable Development and Efforts to Eradicate Poverty.”

The first three sections of the Executive Summary (A-C) deal primarily with natural scientific models which document current and project future global warming and greenhouse gas emissions pathways and scenarios, while section D can be read as the most explicitly “social scientific” to the extent that it deals primarily and more directly with social, economic, and political dimensions of climate mitigation, adaptation, and finance. Notably, section D in the Executive Summary and Headline Statements is itself a summary of two chapters contained in the full report: in other words, the IPCC

23 SR15 also includes an even more condensed, 3 page summary of “Headline Statements.” 15 condenses and folds “Chapter 4: Strengthening and Implementing the Global Response,” which deals more directly with the “international” political dimensions climate change, including discussions of “Energy Systems Transitions” and “Enhancing Multi-Level

Governance” together with “Chapter 5: Sustainable Development, Poverty Eradication, and Reducing Inequalities,” which includes more “local” and sub-national political assessments, including a brief case study of Vanuatu’s “National Planning for

Development and Climate Resistance.” These chapters, in addition to comprising approximately a third of the material covered in the three other “natural science” chapters of the IPCC, are themselves marked by the highest levels of uncertainty and most knowledge gaps relative to the previous chapters.

The findings include little that is new for anyone who has read the IPCC’s last

Assessment Report (AR5, issued in 2013-14) and has kept up with latest developments in climate science in the intervening period, which includes the ratification and ongoing implementation of the Paris Agreement since 2015. This of course is consistent with the nature of the IPCC and its mandate to provide the authoritative science on climate change at the international level. However, a number of points stand out. First is additional confirmation of what we already knew: that “Human activities are estimated to have caused approximately 1.0 °C above pre-industrial levels” and “Global warming is likely to reach 1.5 °C between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate (high confidence)” (A1). This warming furthermore “will persist for centuries to millennia and will continue to cause further long-term changes in the climate system” (A2) and

“climate change risks for natural and human systems are higher for global warming of 1.5

°C than present but lower than at 2 °C” (A3). While Part A produces an assessment that is primarily cumulative, taking the Earth system as a more unitary whole, Part B goes further into the differentiated and uneven consequences of climate change, noting “robust differences in regional climate characteristics,” including “increases in: mean temperature in most land and ocean regions (high confidence); hot extremes in most inhabited regions

(high confidence), heavy precipitation in several regions (medium confidence), and the probability of drought and precipitation deficits in some regions (medium confidence)”

(B1). This section also details projected sea level rise (B2) and “impacts on biodiversity ecosystems,” noting that “Limiting global warming to 1.5 °C instead of 2 °C is projected to lower the impacts on terrestrial, freshwater, and coastal ecosystems and to retain more of their services to humans (high confidence)” (B3). Again, practically all of these points cohere with previous knowledge claims evaluated in AR5, with updates corresponding to new findings since the intervening periods.

In Section C, on “Emissions Pathways and System Transitions Consistent with

1.5 °C Global Warming,” we find the greatest distinction from previous reports compiled by the IPCC. Claims made in this section also appear to be gathering the most amount of attention by international media and climate policy observers. Three key claims stand out. First is the acknowledgement that to meet 1.5 °C warming target, global net CO2 emissions must decline by about 45% from 2010 levels by 2030, and reach net zero emissions around 2015 (C1). Second, to achieve this 1.5 °C warming target “would require rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy, land, urban and infrastructure

(including transport and buildings) and industrial systems (high confidence)… that are

17 unprecedented in terms of scale, but not necessarily in terms of speed” (C2). Third, and arguably the most significant contribution from SR15: “All pathways that limit global warming to 1.5 °C with limited or no overshoot project the use of carbon dioxide removal

(CDR)” (C3).

These three points are significant for a variety of reasons and each warrant further discussion. Regarding C1, or the claim that global net CO2 emissions must decline by

45% from 2010 levels by 2030 (and reach net zero by 2050), it is worth comparing the emissions rates over a similar time period. For example, in its latest Assessment issued back in 2014, the IPCC documented that “Emissions grew more quickly between 2000 and 2010 than in each of the three previous decades” (IPCC 2014b; see also IPCC

2014a).

Second, the IPCC notes that the systems transitions necessary for achieving 1.5

°C are “unprecedented in terms of scale but not necessarily in terms of speed.” Indeed, here we ought to consider Hobsbawm’s description of the world-historical transformations that took place in the “Age of Revolutions” that ushered in the contemporary fossil economy (1996[1962]). Similarly, Jason Moore notes that the industrial revolution of the “long 19th Century” documented by Hobsbawm was itself not unique in terms of size, scope, and speed, but was rather preceded in important respects by the revolutionary world-ecological transformation that took place over the course of the “long 16th Century”:

A modest catalog of early capitalism’s transformations of land and labor, from the 1450s to the eve of the Industrial Revolution, would include the following commodity-centered and -influenced changes… (1) the agricultural revolution of the Low Countries (c. 1400-1600)… [that] 18

allowed three-quarters of Holland’s labor force to work outside of agriculture; (2) the mining and metallurgical revolution of Central Europe, which thoroughly transformed the political ecology of forests… (7) Potosí emerged as the world’s leading silver producer after 1545… (12) English forests were rapidly appropriated during seventeenth-century expansion, such that pig iron output in 1620 would note be exceeded until 1740 even with rising demand, met by imports – especially from Sweden; (13) … iron devoured [Swedish] forests with such speed that the centers of iron production moved quickly towards new forest regions… (21) the relentless geographical expansion of forest product and shipbuilding frontiers were bound up with the increasingly vast fleets of herring, cod, and whaling vessels that… devoured the North Atlantic’s sources of maritime protein… (24) human ecologies too were transformed in many ways, not least through the sharply uneven ‘cerealization’ of peasant diets – and the ‘meatification’ of aristocratic and bourgeois diets – within Europe after 1550… (27) the epoch-making ‘Colombian exchange,’ as Old World diseases, animals, and crops flowed into the New World, and New World crops, such as potatoes and maize, flowed into the Old World. (Moore 2015: 182-187)

The IPCC misses a crucial point however: these previous world-historical transformations were not simply marked by technological innovations or policy implementations that resulted in quantitative leaps in productive capacity. Instead these were also fundamentally a qualitative revolution in the organization of relations of production and exchange. These transformations are the movement from non-capitalist towards capitalist modes of production. In other words, these social, economic, political, and environmental transformations were, in other words, predicated upon a structural process defined by the endless production and accumulation of capitalist value.

Capitalism as a social and environmental system is fundamentally predicated upon infinite growth on a finite planet. In terms of the ecological critique of capitalist political economy, capitalism’s central drive towards endless expansion is central to its anti- ecological nature, due to the social and ecological contradictions and antagonisms this 19 generates. Some critical ecologists refer to capital’s tendency to undermine the material conditions of its own self-reproduction as capitalism’s “second contradiction” (O’Connor

1996), though Paul Burkett (1999) notes that the socio-economic and environmental contradictions stem from the same source: the antagonism of the capital-labor relation.

Capitalism as a means of organizing the ‘metabolic relations’ between humans and nature is inherently unsustainable and thus prone to social and ecological crises, including the

Sixth Great Extinction and climate change. The same structural drive for endless expansion and capital accumulation is what generated the previous systems transitions highlighted by the IPCC, and yet it is precisely this same structural drive that must be resisted and overcome.

The third crucial point from Section C, regarding the centrality of CDR in all 1.5 degree pathways, underlines an important departure from previous assessments: that mitigation targets cannot be achieved by reducing “positive emissions” of greenhouse gases at their source alone (ie targeting the ‘inputs’ of global warming through reducing additional fossil fuel consumption, consuming less animal products, etc.), but that

“negative emissions,” or targeting the ‘outputs’ of global warming by extracting or containing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, must be an important component of a broader mitigation portfolio. The IPCC defines Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) as

“Anthropogenic activities removing CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it in geological, terrestrial, or ocean reservoirs, or products… [and] includes existing and potential anthropogenic enhancement of biological or geochemical sinks and direct air capture and storage” (SR15 SPM-32). Although SR15 refers almost exclusively to CDR

20 and makes little mention of “Negative Emissions Technologies” (NET), CDR activities such as planting trees and implementing carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology at coal-fired power plants can be considered a subset of this broader category. Negative

Emissions Technologies is a synonym for geoengineering, large-scale attempts to deliberately intervene and alter Earth systems processes to make the environment more suitable for socially-determined ends. China’s use of “seeding” the atmosphere to create rainfall during dry spells is commonly noted as an example of geoengineering, though geoengineering is arguably distinct due to the spatial and temporal scales at which the interventions and their subsequent effects can be traced. In the Summary for

Policymakers, the only non-CDR NET that receives any significant attention is Solar

Radiation Management (SRM), the most prominent climate-related NET, most forms of which involve injecting aerosols into the Earth’s upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight back out into space, thereby mitigating global warming by decreasing the total energy input from the sun.24

Finally, regarding the SR15, Part D ends on a somewhat more optimistic note than the previous sections. Entitled “Strengthening the Global Response in the Context of Sustainable Development and Efforts to Eradicate Poverty,” Part D discusses the possibilities for “synergies and trade-offs” between mitigation and adaptation efforts with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It notes that “Sustainable development supports, and often enables, the fundamental societal and systems transitions and

24 Global warming is a product of three distinct factors: total energy input from the sun; the reflectiveness or albedo of the Earth’s surface; and greenhouse gas emissions from anthropogenic sources, such as burning fossil fuels. 21 transformations that help limit global warming to 1.5 °C” (D6), and concludes with a strong case for international cooperation (D7). It does not address any fundamental contradictions between sustainable development and the capitalist imperative for growth, nor does it consider the ways in which capital and sovereignty may pose intrinsic limits to the means and capabilities of realizing sustainable development and socially just mitigation and adaptation goals under conditions of global capitalism.

To sum up, there are three major takeaways from SR15. First, that we have approximately twelve years to implement the changes necessary. Second, limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees is not possible without Carbon Dioxide Removal. Third, the systems transitions necessary for achieving the 1.5 degree target are “unprecendented in scale but not necessarily in terms of speed.”

When surveying responses among the international community, again we note a sharp divide between civil society, on the one hand, and key political economic actors on the other. Among most observers, including many global environmental NGOs, the report signified a “shocking” set of conclusions and implications (Cooper 2018). On the other hand, the response from major players in the global political economy is best understood as business-as-usual.

Together, these dynamics reflect a central problem at the core of contemporary climate politics: the global political system has proven itself incapable of realizing any meaningful progress on climate change. This in turn raises a series of questions that are at the heart of this dissertation project: Why has the global political system been unable to achieve any effective climate mitigation or adaptation? What is politically necessary to

22 safely mitigate climate change and adapt to a warming world? And what are the implications for climate justice?

3.1.

When considering the responses to these questions, we can discern several broad tendencies with important political implications. Regarding the first central question, how or why the global political system has thus far been incapable of resolving the climate crisis – ie regarding the ‘cause’ of the climate crisis and/or the system’s inability to resolve it – two broad sets of responses are dominant. This first set identifies climate change as the greatest collective action problem the world has ever seen, or a planetary

“tragedy of the commons.”25 Drawing from a wide range of sources, including Neo-

Malthusian ecological economics as well as liberal theory, this perspective is hegemonic among the scientific community as well as elite discourse and policy around climate change. It can perhaps best be summarized by the common claim that “humans are causing climate change.” In more general terms, this narrative overlaps with what we can call the (uncritical) “Anthropocene thesis”: that the cumulative and intersecting planetary

25 There is a wide range of academic perspectives that fall within this category, and there are arguably sharp divisions between those who generally endorse Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” model/framework, and those who are more explicitly critical of it. Some, like Soroos (2005), argue that “as politically incorrect as some of Hardin’s proposals have been,” his framework is nevertheless useful for understanding “human-induced climate change ans an evolving global tragedy of the commons” (35). Others, like Ostrom and collaborators (e.g. Dietz, Ostrom, and Stern 2003; Ostrom 2010) reject Hardin’s pessimistic assumptions and expectations about human behavior while retaining the underlying structural model for framing global climate change politics as fundamentally a matter of managing or addressing the “collective action problems” that arise with global “commons” management. For a more critical take on Hardin, see Brinkley 2019. Few of Hardin’s critics have addressed his racism: for a noteworth exception, see this twitter thread by political scientist Matto Mildenberger: https://twitter.com/mmildenberger/status/1102604887223750657?lang=en 23 systems changes, including but not limited to anthropogenic global warming, are the result of a fundamental conflict or crisis in human-nature relations, and that our contemporary global ecological condition is one defined predominantly by the impact of

“human activity” on the Earth.26 Together we can all this the neoclassical narrative, and it can be considered neoclassical in a dual sense: due to its roots in neoclassical economic theory, as well as its invocation of themes present in pre-modern, Western thought, such as humanity’s ‘fall’ or ‘corruption’ of nature.

Framed as a response or reaction to this neoclassical framework and uncritical

Anthropocene thesis, we see a second set of responses to the question of who or what is responsible for the repeated failures to adequately mitigate or adapt to climate change. In contrast to the neoclassical model that abstracts away from historically or socially specific factors and forces, this approach highlights a more specific set of actors, institutions, or motivations that are driving the climate crisis. Among this set of responses, we can identify several answers as to who or what exactly is to blame, but a few stand out: wealthy industrialized states of the Global North, greedy capitalists or capitalist greed, and neoliberalism. An important corollary to this latter approach is that it is not simply “human activity” or “the economy” in the abstract that is the object or target of political action, but it is more specific sets of human activity and institutions, like

26 For examples of the Anthropocene thesis from the natural sciences, see e.g.: Crutzen and Stoermer 2000; Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeil 2007; Steffen et al 2011; Lewis and Maslin 2015; Waters et al 2016. For uses of the Anthropocene framing by social scientists and scholars of global environmental politics and governance, see e.g. Biermann et al 2012; Biermann 2014. Note that in recent years there has been a concerted effort by many Anthropocene scholars to engage critically with the concept, prompted in large part by critical interventions from social sciences and humanities: see, e.g. Lövbrand et al 2009; Bai et al 2015; Biermann et al 2016; Burke et al 2016. 24

“neoliberalism,” that needs to be curtailed. One general claim of this approach, which we can identify as a “radicalism” to the extent that it identifies and seeks to go to the systemic “roots” of the problem, is that we need more and better regulation of capitalism, including its neoliberal variants. For this reason, we can also identify this set of approaches with what scholars call “Green Keynesianism.”27 In the United States now, this approach is perhaps best identifiable with those on the left wing of the Democratic

Party, such as Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and others promoting a “Green

New Deal” (US House of Representatives 2019). This program would see greater state intervention in the economy, to increase regulation of carbon-intensive industries and sectors like energy, manufacturing, and transportation, increase public investments in low-carbon alternatives, while promoting “green jobs,” towards the end of a long-term, government-managed, phase-out of fossil fuels. Green New Deal legislation has been prepared and put forth in the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives in early

2019, and while it has little chance of passing a Republican-controlled Senate (let alone support from President Trump), discourses surrounding Green New Deal and other forms of Green Keynesianism have become prominent in the US and are expected to continue to gain momentum in the run-up to the 2020 Presidential elections.

The second major question concerns the political responses that are deemed necessary to confront the climate crisis. Again we observe two broad answers that are dominant. I call these two approaches “climate governance” and “climate justice.”

27 Mann and Wainwright (2017) are perhaps the most prominent critics of this approach. For more on green new deals and varieties of green capitalism, see e.g.: Candeias 2012; Jessop 2012; Watson 2014; Tienhaara 2014. See also the “Debating Green Strategy” series of articles in New Left Review (especially NLR 109, 112, 115, and 116/117). 25

Finally, with respect to the question regarding the nature of climate justice, based on the foregoing discussion we can again identify at least two streams of thought. The first conceptualizes climate justice as fundamentally a normative ideal that can help us reform existing political institutions and environmental policies. I call this the normative approach to climate justice (which is true even for so-called ‘non-ideal’ theories of justice). The second stream of thought frames climate justice as predominantly a frame or discourse that social and environmental movements use to make political demands on their political institutions and representatives and against competing interests. I call this the sociological approach to climate justice.28

Together, we observe two emergent political forms that are taking shape on a global scale: climate governance and climate justice. What are the relations between climate governance and climate justice?

In this dissertation, I contribute to the emergent literature on the politics of climate change through a critical geopolitical analysis of climate governance and climate justice. My approach is grounded in Marxist critique of capitalist political ecology. I seek to provide an analysis that can overcome the limits of ‘traditional’ or ‘problem- solving’ theoretical approaches to humans and their environments, which have failed to grasp the socio-ecological contradictions that have generated the climate crisis. My

28 Importantly, and in contrast to the prior tendencies, the normative and sociological approaches to climate justice are predominantly academic distinctions, that is, they reflect more general disciplinary tendencies or frameworks for studying climate justice. In short, they correspond with the disciplinary separation of (ideal/normative) “political theory” from (positivist/empirical) “political science” predominant in the Anglophone academy. They may further be considered distinct from a third approach: a more explicitly movement-based or activist-oriented perspective, centered around a conception of climate justice as antisystemic praxis, which I call the movement approach. This approach will be discussed in subsequent sections/chapters. 26 approach further rejects ‘radical’ critiques of neoliberalism, including ‘agonistic’ and

‘new materialist’ political theories, towards one that offers an emancipatory ecological alternative grounded in the ‘actually existing movement’ for climate justice. In so doing,

I explore the relations and contradictions of the antisystemic movements for climate justice with the systemic movements for climate governance in the capitalist nation-state system. In sum, I seek to provide an understanding of their conditions of possibility, asking how are climate governance and climate justice shaped by struggles for hegemony?

This dissertation is composed of two parts: on the Theory and the Praxis of the

Politics of Climate Change. Part One explores the theoretical dimensions of climate politics, through Marxist ecological critique of nature-society relations in capitalism.

Here I develop an original, critical ecological framework by reading Antonio Gramsci’s

Prison Notebooks together with contemporary developments in Marxist ecology. This provides the theoretical grounds for my critical analysis of the praxis of climate politics in Part Two. I apply my Gramscian ecological framework to study the two emergent forms of climate change politics, climate governance and climate justice, and explore each as competing hegemonic projects in world politics. I then conclude with some thoughts on how this critical ecological framework can be used to theorize the future(s) of climate governance and climate justice.

Part One of the dissertation is an analysis of the Political Theory of Climate

Change, and consists of two chapters. In Chapter Two, I demonstrate how existing debates about the politics of climate justice are structured by a binary conception of the

27 political that casts politics as naturally cooperative and consensus-based, on the one hand, or inherently conflictual and a(nta)gonistic on the other hand. Building from insights from Marxist political scientist Bertell Ollman, I argue that a Marxist approach to the climate crisis is necessary not only for intellectually representing, but also for politically resolving, the political ecological contradictions at the heart of the capitalist system.

Ollman argues that the majority of approaches to political science fall into two camps: on the one hand, most have a tendency to isolate and disaggregate political phenomena and social problems from each other, rather than seeing how they are interconnected and structural-systemic. This approach broadly reflects positivist and liberal tendencies, and fails on their inability to adequately theorize the historical and relational specificity of capitalist crises, nor are they capable of theorizing adequate or necessary political means of resolving these crises. On the other hand, ‘radical’ approaches endorse more

‘systemic’ critiques, including leveraging blame towards ‘neoliberalism,’ but neither do they adequately distinguish the specifically historical and social conditions of capitalism.

In fact, as I demonstrate with textual evidence from agonistic theorists like Chantal

Mouffe and Eric Swyngedouw, there is a tendency among radicals to “naturalize” political conflict and a(ntag)onism as an essential feature or characteristic of politics/the political in general, by arguing that political difference, which they link intrinsically with political conflict/a(ntag)onism, defines the ontological nature of the political. In contrast, drawing upon Peter Thomas’s reading of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, I argue that an adequately historicist approach to politics and the political, grounded in a Gramscian conception of hegemony, overcomes such dualism and essentialism through an

28 understanding of politics/the political as a dialectic of coercion and consent. This hegemonic approach to climate politics, which I call “the ecology of the political,” is then applied in Part Two to the “praxis” of climate governance and climate justice.

In Chapter Three, I elaborate upon this Gramscian framework and integrate it with perspectives from Marxist ecologists like John Bellamy Foster, Kohei Saito, and

Jason Moore (among others). The central contribution of this chapter is its ecological conception of the political, whereby struggles for hegemony over the organization of human relations with(in) nature constitute the grounds on which politics takes place. I argue that hegemony is fundamentally an ecological relation, a dialectic of coercion and consent that organizes the ‘metabolic process’ of human and extra-human social

(re)production within nature. I elaborate this Gramscian ecological framework through a theoretical argument about the nature of socio-ecological relations under conditions of capitalist hegemony. Capitalism as a world-ecological system is predicated upon the mediation of human and extra-human relations by capital and state forms. Capitalism’s social and ecological contradictions and antagonisms can thus be located in the structural relations of alienation, domination, and exploitation that are necessary conditions of capital and state relations. Drawing from Saito’s ecological reading of Marx, I define alienation as the fundamental “separation” that divides workers from the means of their social reproduction in the capital-labor relation. This is more than a merely “social” relation (between humans and other humans) but a fundamentally “ecological” relation, insofar as it is predicated upon the separation of humans from their internal and external nature(s) (Saito 2017; see also Moore 2015). However, I also go beyond this definition

29 to identify alienation as implicit to the institution of sovereignty in the Western political tradition and the contradictory relations within nature this concept presupposes: sovereignty is at once defined by an authoritative capacity to intervene materially in the social and natural world, and yet also defined by its relation to an essentialist, ahistoricist,

“natural order.”

Today we face a number of intersecting and converging social and environmental crises. Together these comprise what a number of critical ecologists are calling the

“Capitalocene,” or the contemporary moment of planetary ecological crisis in historical capitalism. Foremost among these ecological crises is the “carbon rift” in the Earth system, or what we can otherwise call the planetary crisis of climate change. Without addressing the structural relations of alienation, domination, and exploitation that constitute the necessary political conditions of the capitalist nation-state system, the global ecological crisis of climate change cannot be resolved, as these relations will continue to generate more contradictions and antagonisms among humans and the rest of nature. Among the examples that we can already begin to see derived from these contradictions and antagonisms of capital and state are “green neo-colonialism,” climate geoengineering, and questions regarding climate migrants/refugees displaced by rising sea levels and other changing environmental conditions. Importantly, there are no adequate “resolutions” to these dilemmas (regarding renewable energy, deliberate interventions to manipulate the planetary environment, the status of populations displaced by global warming, etc.) that can be determined a priori. Rather, these dilemmas are essentially political to the extent that their resolutions can only be determined

“practically” and not merely “theoretically.” The task therefore is to provide an adequate means of grasping these relations and their contradictions towards the end of resolving them politically. Contrary to essentialist political ontologies, such as realism, liberalism, or radicalism, the Gramscian ecological framework I develop, organized around an ecological reading of hegemony, understands politics and the political as a historical dialectic between humans and the rest of nature, which thus enables revolutionary political theory and praxis capable of not just understanding, but potentially resolving, the social and ecological contradictions of capitalism.

Part Two of the dissertation is then dedicated towards a critical analysis of the

Political Praxis of Climate Politics, specifically the two primary forms that are identified as emerging: climate governance and climate justice. Studying political “praxis” (as opposed to “politics” in general) is a particularly complicated/contradictory matter, even or especially for political scientists. First, praxis has a double meaning, insofar as it is constituted by a difference and unity of what is sometimes called “practice” or practical political activity with “theory.” On the one hand, praxis is a concept invoked to signal a specific form of political practice that is self-conscious, reflexive, and informed by theory

(in contrast to political practices or activities that are relatively spontaneous or unreflective, like habits [Hopf 2010]).29 On the other hand, praxis is a concept used to highlight a distinction between theory and practice.

29 In social scientific terms, the ‘praxis’ may be considered approximate to the “method” or “methodology” of a political science, bridging the gap between the “theory” or hypotheses that exist primarily in the mind(s), with the “evidence” or empirics of the reality that the scientist seeks to represent. In the positivist scientific tradition, methods are to be distinct from theories/hypotheses to the extent that the observations and interpretations of the reality that is to be represented are understood to be qualitatively distinct from the theoretical representations that inform the questions and analysis of the data. “Methods” (and to a lesser 31

Secondly, and more specifically relevant to political science as a discipline: the idea or concept of a political scientific examination of political praxis may be considered redundant, to the extent that “politics” (and the practice thereof, “political activity,” etc.) is the self-evident object of political science. What makes an analysis of “political praxis” necessary or even distinct from any other analysis of “politics”? As the

‘theoretical’ discussion in the preceding chapters should make clear, the binary, a priori distinctions between ‘theory’ and ‘praxis’30 are untenable when we consider the social and political totality of which theory and praxis are merely moments in a dialectical relation and historical process. In other words, a dialectical approach is necessary for grasping the unity-in-difference between theory and praxis that informs both the structure of the analysis, as well as the form that climate politics materially takes: in both cases, we must grasp both the abstract and ideological as well as the concrete and material dimensions.

To adequately grasp these dimensions of political praxis, I utilize a critical fieldwork methodology developed out of engagements with Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and approaches to critical human geography. From this approach, there is no strict

extent, “methodology”) are the practical activity that bridge the gap between the theory and the data, which are informed by one’s theory and the specific empirics that are to be analyzed, but ‘theory,’ ‘methods,’ and ‘empirics’ are all considered analytically and ontologically separate categories. The process of ‘collecting’ or even ‘producing’ data is in other words are in the positivist framework considered separate processes from that of ‘analyzing’ or ‘interpreting’ the data, much like the traditional separation between our theoretical ‘ideas’ about the world (theory) are frequently considered separate from the ‘material’ interventions and actions (praxis/practice) in the world. From the critical theoretical perspective I adopt, the qualitative distinctions between theory, methods, methodology, and the raw data ‘produced’ (or ‘collected’) from the world itself is untenable, as the social reality and facts about the world are themselves co-produced in and through the same social and political relations the scholar/observer is a part of. For these reasons, the approach I take is explicitly critical, reflexive, participatory, and anti-positivist. 30 Or for that matter, the a priori distinctions between ‘theory’ and ‘methods/methodology/empirics,’ ‘ideas’ and ‘matter,’ ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ etc. 32 separation between ‘subject’ and ‘object’ of analysis (in other words, ‘we are always already in the field’). We are always already socially and historically situated in the field of power relations that produces the very same political subject-objects that we seek to represent. The task of the critically situated field researcher however is not merely to

‘represent’ the subject-objects of analysis, but to actively and reflexively participate in the ongoing production and reproduction of social and political relations. A political scientific analysis of political praxis, from this standpoint, is thus itself a political matter, insofar as it is inextricably linked to the ongoing processes of social reproduction, including the dialectical production of coercion and consent (hegemony), that constitute political relations. There can in other words be no neutral analysis of political praxis; but rather to produce knowledge relevant to political praxis is itself to produce knowledge that has a “practical” purpose (use value) for subject-objects of analysis. To produce an analysis of climate governance and climate justice is not merely to ‘represent’ these actually-existing political relations and processes, but to actively participate in their ongoing self-constitution. For these reasons, I consider the approach I take to be not merely Gramscian, to the extent that it affirms that this as part of a broader hegemonic process and relation, but this can also be considered an activist-oriented project as well, to the extent that it openly identifies with specific actors and organizations involved in these political struggles, and seeks to produce knowledge useful to their struggles. In this section of the dissertation, the task is to produce a critical analysis of climate governance and climate justice from a standpoint that considers itself part of broader processes and relations of climate governance and climate justice. To that end, the analysis ultimately

33 affirms the necessity of a conception of climate justice as an antisystemic movement, distinct and ultimately opposed to the systemic movement of climate governance, insofar as such an approach is necessary for overcoming the structural-systemic contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist nation-state system that have generated the planetary ecological crisis of climate change in the first place.

In Chapter Four, I center my critical analysis of the geopolitical praxis of climate governance around the UNFCCC and the Paris Regime, drawing upon Gramsci’s conceptions of the capitalist ‘integral state’ and historical blocs. I argue that the state system, including the UNFCCC and the Paris Regime, must be understood as the

‘condensation of force relations’ between competing historical blocs in global climate politics. I define climate governance as the political project of managing the socio- ecological contradictions of the capitalist climate crisis in and through the existing socio- ecological structural conditions of state and capital. In this chapter, I make two main claims. First, that global climate change politics, and thus climate governance, are defined by hegemonic struggles among at least four hegemonic blocs: a reactionary

‘fossil capitalist’ bloc (e.g. the Trump Administration and its allies in the fossil fuel industry); a neoliberal ‘green capitalist’ bloc (e.g. the America’s Pledge’ contingent, the

EU, etc.); a ‘developing world’ capitalist bloc (led by China); and a global ‘movement of movements’ for climate and environmental justice. And second, that institutions and political practices identifiable with the political praxis of climate governance in and through the UNFCCC serve to reproduce the underlying socio-ecological contradictions of capital and state, predicated upon the formal and material separation (or

“regionalization” [Wainwright and Mann 2015]) of ‘state’ and ‘civil society.’ Drawing upon critical fieldwork conducted in and around the UNFCCC, including interviews and oral histories, participant observation and critical spatial analysis, and textual analysis of documents produced in and around the UNCCC (particularly the post-Paris COPs, including COP22 in Marrakech 2016 and COP23 in Bonn 2017), I describe each of these blocs and their defining features (including social and historical composition and objectives). Then, through a close reading of the Paris Agreement, and spatial analysis of

Paris Regime COPs, I show how the Paris Regime has been shaped by competition among the four historical blocs. This discussion will provide insights into the ways in which climate governance corresponds with planetary management of and by an increasing expansive, yet contradictory and fragmented, capitalist integral state system.

In Chapter Five, I conduct a critical geopolitical analysis of the climate justice movement (political praxis of climate justice) based on critical and participatory field research conducted alongside climate justice movement activists and organizations, including at the COP22 and COP23 climate negotiations of the UNFCCC. Here I argue that the struggle for climate justice must be understood as the struggle for hegemony over the metabolic relations between humans and nature. Ecological direct action and the struggle for ‘direct democratic control of the labor process’ is central to the task of realizing this alternative hegemony. An original typology of the political praxis of the climate justice movement, structured by dialectic of coercion and consent, as well as the systemic and anti-systemic nature of the struggle, will be used to interpret four major types of political praxis observed in the field: organizing and planning; discourse and

35 communication; lobbying and ‘orderly’ political force; direct action and ‘disorderly’ political force. The politics of “climate justice” can thus be understood as the negation of

“climate governance,” to the extent that it actively works ‘against’ the structural circuits of the capitalist nation-state system, rather than reproducing its underlying organizational structure of the socio-ecological metabolism. I illustrate this argument with a critical ecological analysis of the politics of climate justice movement actors at the COP23 in

Bonn, Germany 2017.

A central question for both of these chapters is: How are these forms of political praxis defined as a struggle for hegemony? I argue that climate governance and climate justice represent systemic and antisystemic movements of the capitalist nation-state system. Climate governance, by taking existing political ecological relations of state and capital for granted, serves to reproduce the underlying contradictions and antagonisms of the system, even as it nominally seeks to ‘manage’ the crisis, if not actually ‘resolve’ it.

Climate justice, on the other hand, represents the antisystemic movement against the capitalist nation-state system. The question however is not merely a positive one (what is climate justice), but a historical, dialectical question of necessity (what must climate justice become) if it is to realize itself and its stated objective of “system change not climate change.”

Finally, I conclude this dissertation by reflecting on the implications of this analysis for our understanding of climate justice and the possibilities of realizing it. There are important insights for critical ecological theory and analysis of the climate justice movement to be found in prior revolutionary struggles, as well as current and ongoing

36 ecological resistance movements around the world. Important glimpses into the revolutionary potential of the movement can be observed by seeing these struggles as linked with prior revolutionary moments, such as the Paris Commune and 1968. Climate justice, like communism, is thus not merely a regulative ideal, but may be materially constituted in and through revolutionary ecological praxis. Much in the same way that

Marxism can be understood as a negative dialectic of capitalist society, and feminism as a negative dialectic of patriarchal society, so too can the struggle for climate justice be understood as a negative dialectic against the alienation, domination, and exploitation of the capitalist nation-state system’s relations with nature. At the same time, more insights into the ‘positive’ political dimensions of the movement, such as struggles for food sovereignty and energy justice, are necessary as well. This provides content for an understanding of climate justice as the “negation” or “negative dialectic” of climate injustice, and the claim that climate justice is the “actually-existing movement” against the social and ecological contradictions of the capitalist nation-state system. Critical theory, particularly in the form of “engaged solidarity” through activist-oriented fieldwork, can play a role in the production of climate justice by illuminating the contours and contradictions of the movement and its relations with the capitalist nation- state system, and providing productive insights into strategic and tactical questions regarding the ‘balance of forces’ in world ecological politics.

Part I: Theorizing the Politics of Climate Change

Chapter 2. Contending Conceptions of the Climate Crisis: Moderate, Radical, and Marxist Perspectives on the Politics of Climate Change

2.1. Introduction

The global ecological crisis of climate change is having profound impacts on the material world as well as our perceptions of it. Surveying the vast literature on the social scientific and humanistic analyses of the climate crisis and the Anthropocene, it is difficult to find much in the way of consensus except this one: that the global ecological crisis of climate change is a profound problem for our politics.31 However, this apparent consensus quickly falls into dissensus regarding what the political nature of the crisis and the means of resolving it (and whether such a thing is even possible).

How are we to understand this contradiction, between the widespread consensus that climate change is fundamentally a question of politics, and the radical dissensus regarding the necessary political means of addressing it? And what are the implications for our understanding of the relations between politics and nature? What, in other words, is the political theory necessary for the planetary ecological crisis of climate change?

To answer these questions, I consider an emergent literature regarding the politicization of climate change and environmental politics. In this chapter, I demonstrate the limits of these leading approaches to the politics of climate change and argue on

31 The literature and debates around climate change and the Anthropocene have exploded within the past decade, and in many cases not only span across multiple disciplinary fields, but in fundamental ways challenge many of the prior divisions and distinctions between the “natural” and “social” sciences and the humanities. For more, see… 39 behalf of a Marxist ecological alternative. First, I argue that radicals are right to criticize the moderate approaches on account of their inability to account for the fundamental antagonisms which lie at the heart of the climate crisis. As a fundamentally political matter, climate change cannot be adequately addressed by scientific, technical, rationalist, or even deliberative democratic means, and instead requires alternatives which fundamentally challenge the status quo.

However, I also disagree with many radicals on account of their own inability to adequately grasp the nature of the crisis and its politics. First, I criticize the agonists on their essentialization of political difference and its social character: rather than an a- historicist narrative of political antagonism as an ontological condition of the human, I argue that a more adequate account of politics understands political relations historically and relationally through the emergence and shifting configuration of human relations within nature.

Hence, the political is not merely irreducible to political antagonism, nor is it reducible to the human, but it must also be seen as a fundamentally historical and ecological relation. But it is not enough to turn to a new materialist conception of radical democracy either, as this approach fetishizes non-human agency at the expense of reducing any political significance for a distinctly human (and potentially extra-human) subjectivity. A dialectical, rather than a monist, approach to ecology is necessary to grasp the adequately historicize political matter: human beings are not merely part of or coextensive with nature (as the post-humanist ecological critiques of nature/society dualism have it), it is the distinctiveness of our human nature that we are political

40 subjects which dialectically produces the relations between humans and (the rest of) nature. To the extent that the organization of material self-reproduction is a fundamentally political matter, the political may be understood as the dialectical mediation of the social and the natural. A ecological account of the political nature of hegemony as the leadership of a given class (subject-position) in the capitalist world- ecology provides the necessary means of analyzing the world politics of climate change.

And to the extent that both radical approaches fail to account for the fundamental role that capital and state play in organizing the social reproduction of the capitalist world- system, they fail to provide adequate political means of addressing the ecological contradictions and political antagonisms that drive the crisis.

Against these alternatives, I propose a Marxist ecological alternative that can overcome the limits of these predominant approaches and provide a more adequate means of analyzing the global politics of climate change. Rather than defining politics in dualistic opposition between consensus or a(nta)gonism, as moderates on the one hand and radicals on the other do, a Gramscian approach through analysis of the production of hegemony and the integral state (system) can adequately capture the ecological dimensions of the political, thereby providing the means for an adequately Marxist ecological critique of the geopolitics of climate change. This in turn will provide the grounds for the Marxist ecological analysis of the politics of climate change and the global movement for climate justice in the subsequent sections.

2.2. The Politicization Debate: Moderate and Radical Perspectives on the Nature of Climate Politics

There is widespread recognition that the global ecological crisis of climate change is at its core a fundamentally political problem, yet we have only just begun to think critically about the implications of the crisis for our conceptions of the political. At the heart of the matter lies a contradiction. On the one hand, there is a widespread consensus among climate change scholars, activists, and policy-makers that our current global ecological conditions are unsustainable: that is, a continuation of "business-as-usual" will lead to emissions scenarios and warming rates that will have catastrophic implications for life on the planet. For examples of these we need look not much farther than the

Environmental section of any reputable newspaper – consider Sir Nicholas Stern's comments in The Independent noting that the global economy will “self-destruct” if we keep burning fossil fuels (Johnston 2016) – a claim supported by the latest climate science research (e.g. Hansen et al 2016; Oil Change International 2016; IPCC 2018).

On the other hand, there is a profound dissensus regarding what is politically necessary to resolve the crisis. For much of its history, the problem of climate politics has been framed in terms of the need to recognize it as a political problem as such, as a matter that requires political means to address it, or at the very least, an issue that requires political action and intervention, so as to prevent it from becoming a political problem in the future. Such is how we might read the history of climate politics, predominantly framed as it has been as a problem of mitigation to prevent or avoid future warming.

Today, the idea that climate change is solely or even predominantly a political matter in the future tense is no longer tenable – instead, it is increasingly being recognized that 42 climate change is an actual political problem that still requires mitigating against future increases in global warming over what we have already experienced, as well as political means of adapting to current and future changes to our environmental conditions. There is no longer as much focus on the need for formal recognition of climate change as a political problem in the first place, as climate change has been on the global political agenda for at least a generation now; rather, the primary focus now is how to achieve an effective political response to the problem, or what such a response should or would even look like, or if any such thing is even possible.32 And here is where the perspectives diverge.

To take one example, we can look at the discourse of ecological modernization scholars and theorists like Amory Lovins.33 According to this perspective, politicians should effectively get out of the way and allow market and economic forces to function properly, such that we can safely allow our transition to a post-fossil economy to be carried out.34 To the extent that political leaders, policy-makers, and the public

32 This latter point has become particularly salient since the 2016 US presidential election of Donald Trump. 33 For more on ecological modernization (sometimes shortened to “eco-modernism”), see, e.g. Mol and Spaargaren 2000; Buttel 2000; Fisher and Freudenberg 2001. Lovins is not always considered a part of the ecological modernization school, strictly speaking, but his thought and work has developed shares many of the features of ecological modernization, and he is often considered a fellow traveler whose work generally targets a more public (rather than academic) audience; his most well-known book is probably Hawken, Lovins, and Lovins 1999; see also Lovins 2011. Today, many eco-modernists are associated with The Breakthrough Institute, which is perhaps the leading thinktank promoting eco-modernism: see, e.g. Asafu- Adjaye et al 2015; Trembath 2015. 34 Responding to a question about President Trump’s effect on US energy policy and emissions, Lovins noted “The economics haven’t changed… the energy industries, especially the renewable industries and their financiers, have … said that the business case has indeed steadily improved, it will continue to improve and there’s really nothing significant the president can do about it… [A]nalysing the political economy of the United States energy system, the president is not the federal government, the federal government is not all government and, indeed, we do most of our energy policy in the US at a state or even a local level and government is not the only or even the most important actor in energy and climate policy. 43 institutions of the state have a role in the matter, it should be primarily to ensure that politics do not contaminate the process. And while some politicians and political movements can be seen as effective leaders for the transition while still in public office,35 the real sources of leadership will come from the progressive forces in the private sector, especially high-profile figures who straddle the public-private divide such as Al Gore,

Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk.

What is important to note is the implicit conception of the political that informs the eco-modernist perspective. Politics in this view is a corrupting or debilitating condition, and to the extent that it is present it should be mitigated or offset by other forms of social, economic, or cultural innovations. To the extent that our existing climate politics are failing, it is due to a perception that there is too much politicization of the issue and that we need to create the conditions for consensus and cooperation to enable a transition to a post-carbon economy.

Eco-modernism has been widely criticized from a variety of perspectives, both traditional-scientific or problem-solving, and more critical, theories within political science. Scholars of climate politics, particularly institutionalists, emphasize the need for binding institutional mechanisms and credible enforcement procedures as necessary political conditions to overcome what is not simply "political interference" with what would be idealized "market conditions." Markets are far from a-political phenomena;

So keep calm and carry on, not much will change, there will be a great deal of rhetoric and litigation and policy conflict, but the underlying market forces are so powerful they’re not about to get diverted by short term politics.” (Timperley 2017; italics added) 35 Lovins cites the German government and their Energiewende (“Energy Transition”) as a favorable example (Timperley 2017). For more on the Energiewende, see Evans 2016. 44 rather, their very production and maintenance is predicated upon an intervening political authority, to establish, protect, and manage the property rights regimes which structure the market relations (Stephan and Lane, eds 2015). Not merely an economic but a political economic approach is warranted. Eco-modernists fail to provide an adequate account for this.

There are approaches which suggest that politics is not merely the problem, but rather the solution for climate change, and including moderate and critical approaches alike. The greater line of difference, we might say, turns on the question not just of the politics of climate change, but the politicization of climate change. Or so we may define the emergent "politicization debate" in the literature on climate politics. As we will see, this debate turns on the question regarding the nature of the political, and as such, has important implications for how we understand the relations between politics and nature.

In his 2000 article, “What is Political Science?” Bertell Ollmann offers a threefold typology of approaches to understanding approaches to politics and political science, which he characterizes as “moderate,” “radical,” and “Marxist.” The moderate approach,

Ollmann argues, identifies political problems in the world as the basis for political scientific research, but treats these problems and their sources as largely disconnected from one another, as discrete issues or themes to be tackled one by one, disciplinarily.

The radical, on the other hand, sees political problems as interconnected, and causally linked through a system of relations (Ollmann 2000: 555-6). According to Ollmann, only the Marxist perspective adequately ties these political relations, problems, and their

(potential) solutions together, naming the system “capitalism” and understanding the

45 distinctly political role that the state and class relations play in organizing these relational contradictions and antagonisms. And it is only by struggling against capitalism and its political form (the nation-state system), that we can actually seek to overcome these problems, according to this perspective that we call “Marxism” (Ollmann 2000).

This typology is useful for understanding current debates over climate politics.

“Moderate” perspectives span the sub-fields of social science, advocating piece-meal approaches to the multi-variant tasks and challenges that the climate crisis presents.

Perhaps most fundamentally this is reflected in the division between “mitigation” and

“adaptation,” which has been fundamental to the political framing of climate change since the origins of the IPCC and UNFCCC. Climate change mitigation refers to attempts to address the root causes of climate change, namely the global warming of the atmosphere through the emission of greenhouse gases (GHG). Such attempts at

'solutions,' which range from the variety of proposals to reduce CO2 emissions to more radical for geo-engineering (attempts to deliberately manipulate the Earth's environment to counteract the greenhouse effect), are in effect efforts to provide what in traditional political economic theory is a public good: a stable climatic environment. On the other hand, “adaptation” to climate change involves, at the most basic level, implementing what are seen as necessary responses to the changing environment that is occurring as a result of climate change. This ranges potentially from simply ensuring better disaster- preparedness at a household level, to the possibility of wholesale migration of populations from low-lying flood-prone areas. These problems of adaptation are

46 necessarily geographically specific and thus tend to take the form of private goods.36 As such, the political “problems” of climate change can for many environmental social scientists be reduced to specific sets of “collective action” problems, to be managed through the negotiation and construction of environmental regimes, the facilitation of collectively rational public and private cooperation and competition, and other such political administrative and technical means. In terms familiar to the social scientific literature, many of these approaches can be understood through the framework of climate or Earth System “governance” (see, e.g. Okereke et al 2009; Biermann 2014; Biermann, et al 2012; Gupta 2014; see also Chapter 4).

Within the field of environmental political science and climate change politics, we can further identify moderate and radical perspectives on climate change politics according to whether or not they view the “politicization” of climate change as a primarily a “problem” or as a “solution.” This is how the debate is framed by science communications scholars Yves Pepermans and Peter Maeseele (2016), who identify four main types of “consensus-building” approaches to climate change. The “technocratic” approach sees climate change as an objective, scientific phenomena, which requires the right kind of communication strategies to convince individuals to change their minds, and their behavior, with regards to climate and the environment.37 Accordingly, there is much

36 For more on the distinction between “mitigation” and “adaptation,” see IPCC 2014. For more on the various ethical and political dimensions of the problem of climate change, see e.g. Gardiner 2011; Steffen 2011; Jamieson 2011, 2014. 37 Pepermans and Maeseele cite popular science websites such as “Skeptical Science” and “The Consensus Project” as examples where “scientists aim 'to remove the politics from the debate by concentrating solely on the science'” (2016, 479). Other examples of this approach could include eco-modernists more generally, including those at neoliberal thinktanks such as the Breakthrough Institute (Asafu-Adjaye et al 2015). 47 overlap between this group and the “social marketing” approach, which emphasizes the role that political psychological “framing” can play in addressing climate change. These approaches emphasize political strategies and techniques that highlight climate change's effects on security, economics, and other politically relevant categories that voters respond to and act upon (e.g. Kahan 2012; Nisbet and Fahy 2015; Zia and Todd 2010).

These two sets of approaches, which are complementary,38 are “common sense”

(Gramsci 1971) conceptions of climate politics from a rationalist, secular, natural scientific worldview. As such, these perspectives are ubiquitious and hegemonic in capitalist society, especially among those who share a broadly “liberal” or “progressive” outlook on climate change.39

The third and fourth types of politically moderate, consensus-building approaches take a generally more “normative” environmental political theoretical approach. “Green republican” approaches emphasize the role that constructing discourses, institutions, and practices around a conception of a “green citizenship” or “green state” can play in

38 What might be seen as a crucial dividing line among these two approaches is their respective theories or outlooks on democracy. As their names suggest, “technocratic” approaches may endorse, implicitly or explicitly, “elitist” (or Schumpeterian) theories of democracy, whereby climate scientists, regulators, bureaucrats, and their institutions should be politically insulated from the citizenry or public opinion. Accordingly these perspectives often express outrage and dismay against what they see as the reactionary wave of “populism” embodied in figures like Donald Trump. Example of the technocratic approach can be seen in the otherwise differing policy suggestions of NASA scientist James Hansen, fellow NASA scientist and ecologist James Lovelock, and eco-authoritarian William Ophuls. On the other hand, “social marketers” clearly have a more generally “optimistic” perspective on the masses, who just need more “persuasion” with respect to environmental and climate issues. Their theory of democracy is still an attenuated one, at most advocating a more broadly representative, proceduralist, or liberal institutionalist conception. (Consider Cass Sunstein’s work on “nudge” politics) 39 As Gramsci (1971) notes, even (or especially) hegemonic ideologies are complex and messy: hence while secularism and rationalism may be hegemonic in capitalist societies, they are neither uncontested (consider reactionary populism, which in Western societies is often undergirded by an authoritarian Christianity) nor exclusive (as most mainline religious institutions in Western countries endorse climate science, and many climate and natural scientists have religious faith). 48 addressing climate change. These approaches expand upon the narrowly individualist or consumer-oriented conceptions of the technocratic or social marketing frameworks by adding a more explicitly “political” dimension, in the more “classical” sense as bound up with “political community,” to their environmentalism (e.g. Eckersley 2004; Barry and

Eckersley, eds 2005; Dobson and Bell, eds 2005; Dobson and Eckersley, eds 2006).

“Deliberative” greens go beyond the republican's conception of a universal or objectively-identifiable “good life” by drawing upon Habermassian-inflected theories of political and ecological engagement and participation, most notably in the work of John

Dryzek and his collaborators (Dryzek 2013; Stevenson and Dryzek 2012, 2014). Political theorist Amanda Machin uses a similar four-fold framing of moderate approaches to climate politics in her 2013 book Negotiating Climate Change.40

Together these approaches can all be understood as “consensus-building” insofar as they all agree that the lack of progress in resolving the climate crisis is a result of the politicization of climate change (Machin 2013; Pepermans and Maeseele 2016).

That is, these approaches see ideological and partisan divisions as inhibiting the potential for cooperation and collaboration in jointly addressing the climate change issue. Climate change here is understood as a fundamentally objective phenomena that can be apprehended and rationally managed through scientific and deliberative means: thus the

40 Machin's typology consists of “techno-economic,” “ethical-individualist,” “green republican,” and “green deliberative democratic” approaches, against which she advances her “radical democratic” alternative. Note that it might be necessary to consider additional social scientific and political theoretical approaches within this “moderate” framework, such as green Rawlsianism (e.g. Vanderheiden 2008) or other forms of environmental democratic theory, such as environmental majoritarianism (Ellis 2016). This framing is not meant to be exhaustive as much as illustrative, largely derived from the “radical democratic” literature on climate politics that my critique is primarily addressed towards.

49 recommended strategies and tactics for addressing the crisis are those which de- emphasize political divisions, and antagonisms, and instead seek to promote compromise.

“Politics,” in other words, is the obstacle to be overcome in order to achieve success in addressing the climate change issue (Pepermans and Maeseele 2016, 479-480). I call them “moderate” according to Ollman's typology insofar as the climate problems they identify can all be parsed out according to their distinct and specific causes and effects, which are in turn to be handled by distinct policy approaches and disciplinary specialists.

Importantly, however, they are moderate to the extent that while criticizing actually- existing political practices and institutions, the solutions they propose are essentially compatible with or reinforcing of the status quo. That is, they are reformist, as the political structures and institutions themselves are not seen as a fundamental source of the political problems, but rather primarily the source of their potential solutions.

Before proceeding, it is worth highlighting the relationship between these

“consensus-building approaches” identified by scholars of climate politics with institutionalist approaches in international relations (IR) scholarship in political science.

For decades, research on international environmental politics, and climate change in particular, has been dominated by “regime theory” and institutionalist approaches.41 The predominant framing of the problematique in these approaches has been how to ensure effective cooperation among nation-states under conditions of international anarchy.

41 For examples of these approaches, see e.g.: Young 1989, 2011, 2012; Zürn 1998; Barrett 1999, 2009; Luterbacher and Sprinz, eds 2001; Gupta 2002; Paterson et al 2003; Kütting 2004; Mitchell 2006; Thompson 2006, 2010; Grundig 2006; Harris 2007; Biermann 2007; Biermann and Pattberg 2008; Andonova and Mitchell 2010; Keohane and Victor 2011, 2016; Zelli 2011; Vormedal 2012; Morin and Orsini 2013; Newell et al 2012; Mitchell 2013; Zelli and van Asselt 2013; Thompson and Verdier 2014; Graham and Thompson 2015; Michaelowa 2015; Dauvergne and Clapp 2016; Alger and Dauvergne 2018. 50

Climate change, like most environmental problems, in these approaches is predominantly conceptualized as a collective action or global public goods problem. The challenge that anarchy presents therefore is how to ensure mutually beneficial outcomes can be produced in the absence of a global sovereign authority capable of transcending the competing interests among nation-states and thereby act on behalf of the global public good. The task for these approaches, therefore, is to produce better understandings of how international regimes and institutions can facilitate this type of cooperation and produce collective goods, while overcoming the collective action problems (including the

“tragedy of the global commons”) that international politics (among nation-states) are rife with. Despite the fact that many climate and environmental politics scholars outside of political science tend to fail to engage with IR literature on climate and environmental politics, we can consider most regime theoretical, institutionalist, and climate governance scholarship to also fall into this “consensus-building” framework given that cooperation and collective action among nation-states and other international or transnational actors whose relations may otherwise be beset by conflicts driven by “private” interests is often framed, implicitly or explicitly, as a primary goal, motivation, or normative good. (For more on these regime theory, institutionalist, and governance approaches to climate and environmental politics, see Chapter 4.)

On the other hand, the radicals criticize the moderates on their inability to grasp the structural-systemic inequalities and injustices that define the socio-ecological context of climate politics, which itself is seen as symptomatic of the “post-political” tendencies of neoliberal globalization. This other, radical side of the politicization debate insists that

51 the fundamental problem in climate politics is the exact opposite of that identified by the moderate consensus-builders: rather than seeing "politicization" as a key problem to be overcome or avoided, this other group of scholars argues that it is a lack of politicization around the climate change issue that obstructs any real capacity for resolving the crisis

(Swyngedouw 2010, 2011; Moolna 2012; Goeminne 2012; Machin 2013; Kenis and

Lievens 2014; Kenis and Mathijs 2014; Stephan and Lane, eds 2015; Pepermans and

Maeseele 2016). By affirming a rationalist, positivist, and natural scientific worldview as the only scientifically- and socially-responsible approach to climate politics, the moderate approaches exclude or dismiss dissenting perspectives, which seek to call into question those fundamental structures and relations they take for granted, as irrational, extremist, or unrealistic. As Gert Goeminne (2012) notes, this tendency of the moderates to occlude more systemic critiques of climate politics, and thereby more radical solutions to the crisis, seeks to erase or suppress the fundamentally political nature of climate politics, which then manifests as a “return of the repressed” in the form of political reaction and climate denialism. This is a point laid bare in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election of climate denier Donald Trump and the rise of anti-ecologism qua reactionary nationalism, what Mann and Wainwright call “Climate Behemoth” (2018; see also

Haeringer and Mueller 2016).42

Against this moderate, “depoliticizing” approach, the radical perspective insists that discourse around climate change must place political contention at its heart. The

42 Trumpism is of course not the only form of reactionary nationalism or right-wing populism that is anti- ecological: also consider Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s condemnations of the Paris Agreement, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s pledges to further open the Amazon rainforest to mining, logging, and agriculture. 52 radical, or what Pepermans and Maeseele (2016) call the “critical debate,” perspective affirms the need for contention and struggle around these essential questions precisely because the climate crisis is so deeply entwined with practically every facet of our social lives, and cannot be neatly separated from the actually-existing inequalities and injustices in our modern world-system (480-481). Political dissension around climate change is not simply due to disagreements over policy preferences or cost-benefit distributions, but encompasses fundamental tensions over structural inequalities and oppression.

One primary source of theoretical inspiration for some of these scholars comes from the radical democratic and political theory of "agonism," particularly the work of

Chantal Mouffe (2005, 2013; see also Laclau and Mouffe 1985).43 This radical approach emphasizes the ontological dimension of the politics in the inescapably antagonistic nature of social and political life. According to this perspective, the problem with moderate or consensus-building approaches to climate politics is that they neglect the ontological dimension of antagonism which defines the political. From the standpoint of political agonism, moderate approaches conflate the distinction between “politics,” or

"the ensemble of practices, discourses, and institutions that seeks to establish a certain order and to organize human coexistence," and “the political,” that ineradicable

"dimension of antagonism which can take many forms and can emerge in diverse social relations" (Mouffe 2013, 2-3). The antagonistic nature of the political is what defines it

43 Agonism is arguably the leading representative of radicalism in contemporary political theory, but not all radicals are agonists: new materialism and socialism occupy two other wings as well (see below) 53 as a distinct sphere of social life, as opposed to what is otherwise merely social, economic, cultural, etc.

On what basis do agonists accord this centrality of antagonism to the political as a field of relation in itself? Following Mouffe, agonists identify political opposition as ontologically derived from social identity through social difference. The construction of social identity is predicated upon the production of social difference. In the words of

Mouffe,

[Once] we understand that every identity is relational and that the affirmation of a difference is a precondition for the existence of any identity - i.e. the perception of something 'other' which constitutes its 'exterior' - we can understand why politics, which always deals with collective identities, is about the constitution of a 'we' which requires as its very condition of possibility the demarcation of a 'they' (2013: 5)

According to this framework, political identity can only ever be understood in relation to its other. This expresses a post-foundational view that affirms that there is no ultimate essence or objectivity “inherent to things [in] themselves" (Mouffe 2013: 4). Another way of putting this is that there is no nature to political identity, or that politics has no natural basis, except insofar as it is defined by difference. That is, the nature of the political is to be found in its antagonistic oppositions. The differences and divisions that define social relations are thus what define the oppositions and conflicts that we identify with the properly political dimensions of society, in contrast to the merely technical or administrative dimensions associated with politics. Radicals affirm antagonism as determinative of social and political life, asserting “the political should be conceived as an ontological dimension that determines our very human condition" (Goeminne 2012,

4). 54

But what derives political antagonism from political difference? Here is where agonists trace their legacy directly to that of Carl Schmitt (2005[1922], 2007[1932]). It is true, agonists note, that although the construction of a "we" is predicated upon the construction of a "they," this does not mean that "such a relation is by necessity antagonistic" (Mouffe 2013, 5). Rather, it merely means that the 'other' always necessarily poses a latent or potential threat. Since political identity has no ultimate basis except that which it is defined against,

there is always the possibility that this 'us'/'them' relation might become one of friend/enemy[, which] happens when the others, who up to now were considered as simply different, start to be perceived as putting into question our identity and threatening our existence. From that point on, as Carl Schmitt has pointed out, any form of us/them relation… becomes the locus of an antagonism. (Mouffe 2013, 5)

Overcoming political divisions and achieving consensus on a given issue is, for the agonists, at best merely transitory, and often fragile. The goal is thus not to ignore or eradicate political difference in order to avoid or prevent disorder (or even civil war) – this would in any case ultimately be futile, given the ontological nature of the political – but rather to forge consensus upon a core set of democratic principles that allow political difference and disagreement to flourish, while subliminating the antagonism between political enemies into (socially acceptable forms of) political agonism between adversaries with whom there is a base level of "common allegiance to 'liberty and equality for all,' while disagreeing about their interpretation" (Mouffe 2013, 7).

According to the agonists, such are the necessary means by which social and political order can be achieved and maintained, however transient, uncertain, or unstable

55 it may be. These are also the grounds on which the state is deemed a necessary means to ensure such conditions. Indeed, Mouffe, who has advised left-wing populist movements and political parties such as PODEMOS in Spain, has expressed strong criticism and skepticism towards autonomist, Marxist, and anarchist critiques of state power and anti- state movements, and ultimately advocates electoral politics as a necessary political means of recovering democracy.44

For the radical scholars of climate and environmental politics, this avowal of the agonistic turn has important political implications. In the words of Eric Swyngedouw, the relevant question is "no longer about bringing environmental issues into the domain of politics as… how to bring the political into the environment" (2011, 254-5). That is, how can we not only resist but in fact overcome the illusory 'consensus' that currently organizes climate change politics amid the 'post-political' condition of neoliberalism, in order to achieve more democratic environments.

As we can see, the problem in the division between these two approaches – the moderate and the radical – is not merely that they adopt different epistemological stances

(foundationalism or post-foundationalism) or even that their diagnoses of the problem are distinct. Rather, the problem is that what follows are fundamentally oppositional strategic political implications. It is not enough to say that both sides agree on the necessity of resolving climate change “politically," but rather that what precisely this

44 “The first step is to reestablish what has been lost. The ultra-left is wrong when they publicly advocate for the destruction of capitalism, of the state, and things like this. This is the part of the left that has always existed without any real influence, power, or strategy… [E]lections are where people must come together for common aspirations. Elections offer real opportunities to articulate different kinds of struggles in the form of a collective will.” (Mouffe qtd. in Shahid 2016) 56 necessitates stand in distinct contradiction. To seek a goal of "social consensus," as the moderates do, requires "communication strategies and public forums which diffuse ideological polarization and increase consensus" (Pepermans and Maeseele 2016, 478).

These strategies and conditions are recognizable to liberal, republican, and deliberative democratic approaches in political theory.

However, if the goal is "opening the space for debate between different choices for alternative socio-environmental futures," through a political position known as

"agonism" (Pepermans and Maeseele 2016, 478; Machin 2013), this implies a necessary role for conflict and opposition, not consensus and cooperation. According to these radical theories of climate politics, it is essential to foment opposition and dissent to the alleged "consensus," not fall in line with it. Thus we have two opposed strategic positions from the standpoint of what otherwise could be a common cause: to respond politically to the challenge of climate change.

2.3. The Limits of Moderate and Radical Approaches: A Marxist Critique

Returning to Ollman’s conception of moderate and radical approaches, we recall that moderates fail to see the relational and systemic character of political problems, preferring to treat them as distinct and isolable phenomena. We may further add that this approach affirms that political problems can be apprehended and managed through positivist and empiricist epistemologies, by which the primary role of political science is to contribute disciplinary knowledge to inform practical policymaking “out in the world.”

The great problem with this approach is the extent to which it fails to identify the

57 systematic and interconnected nature of political phenomena. Just as there is no firm separation between the observer and observed in this context, nor can we see how political resolutions to political problems may be achieved without taking into account their systemic nature. Incremental reforms and policy adjustments may make similarly limited impacts, and temporarily alleviate issues, with possible cumulatively beneficial effects over time and space, which when taken in isolation can be a necessary and desirable thing. However, without identifying the structural-systemic source of the problems, any such reform is necessarily limited. It is the underlying structural relations that must be addressed, not simply their “appearance” in the form of the specific problems that emerge.

In the previous section I discussed how radical approaches to climate politics emphasize the structural nature of the conflicts and antagonisms around climate change.

Agonists assert that the relational nature of social identify and difference manifests in the conflicts and antagonisms which define the ontological character of “the political,” that in turn structures “politics” as we know it. While agonism is not the only variety of radical approaches to climate and environmental politics,45 agonistic approaches, including some variants of left-wing populism (Bosworth 2019), are among the leading radical alternatives to climate politics.

The radical agonists are right to insist upon the fundamentally political nature of the climate problem as one that goes beyond what mere cooperation and consensus can

45 At least two additional approaches are increasingly prevalent: new materialisms and Green Keynesianism. 58 hope to address under contemporary conditions. Naomi Klein, perhaps the leading activist-scholar of the climate justice movement in the world today, makes a similar point: the fault of liberal environmentalism and moderate approaches to climate change is that they fail to appreciate how reactionary movements (like climate deniers at the

Heritage Foundation and in the Trump Administration) understand the political stakes of climate change better than they do. Taking climate change seriously means recognizing that everything (from the distribution of costs and benefits in society to the conditions of life on Earth itself) is at stake – hence the title This Changes Everything (2015). Radicals are right to affirm a need for a conception of politics that goes beyond “consent” and

“cooperation” to emphasize the places for “resistance” and “a(nta)gonism” as well.

Indeed, we might say this is immanent to the nature of the Anthropocene thesis, taken to its logical political conclusion: that the planetary crisis we face has world-historical implications, and requires a fundamental rethinking and re-engagement with the taken- for-granted nature of our politics and political systems (let alone our theories of those politics and political systems). We cannot assume that the social and political structures and institutions which have given rise to this crisis are adequate to the task of resolving it.

And to the extent that the radical perspective forces us to acknowledge the immanently political nature of the crisis and its systemic relations, they provide a more adequately and appropriately political approach to the climate crisis of the Anthropocene than the moderates are capable of producing.

There are however at least three problems with the radical agonistic approach to climate politics, each of which is related to the other. First, they reduce politics and the

59 political to a binary between cooperation and consensus, on the one hand, vs. conflict and coercion on the other, rather than understanding these dimensions as moments in a dialectic. Second, agonistic approaches endorse a purely social ontology that naturalizes conflict as the essence of the political condition, which fails to adequately historicize the

‘social’ and ‘political’ conditions of the ‘ecological’ relations between humans and the rest of nature. In other words, agonism’s strictly social ontology displaces the historical processes of (human) alienation from (non- or extra-human) nature, including but not limited to those which characterize capitalism, as a primary source of social and ecological contradictions, which in turn manifest as the political conflicts and antagonisms we observe. Last but not least, the radicals fail to account for the specificity of the structural contradictions and antagonisms of capitalism as a means of organizing the relations between humans and nature, including as they manifest with respect to the climate crisis. This means that they are unable to provide adequate means of theorizing potential (re)solutions to the climate crisis.

2.4. Radical Ecology, Political Ecology, Ecosocialism: For Marxist Ecology

Over the past several decades, a robust literature has emerged to explore the social and ecological contradictions of capitalism through a historical materialist framework.

We can identify a variety of approaches and perspectives towards understanding the relations and dynamics between humans and nature in historical capitalism. Before we identify the specificity of what I call the field of Marxist ecology – the application of

Marxist critique to human-nature relations – it is worth situating Marxist ecology in

60 relation to three related, overlapping, and yet distinct fields: radical ecology, political ecology, and eco-socialism.

Radical approaches to ecology are, like their more general radical political counterparts, defined by their tendency to get at the “root” of the problems or issues they identify, specifically by centering their analysis around the relations between humans and their environments (rather than focusing exclusively on human relations and interests).

Many of these approaches emerged alongside the more mainstream environmentalist movements taking place in the developed world in the wake of the “Great Acceleration” during the post-war expansion of the global economy. One of the prominent early tendencies of this radical ecological movement were so-called “deep ecology” perspectives (e.g. Arne Næss), which criticized the “shallow” environmentalisms that occupied a more prominent space in the public sphere in the advanced, industrialized,

Western core, including the burgeoning Green Party movement. Deep ecologists are characterized by their critique of anthropocentrism – that is, the prioritization or presumption of human interests and values against or over the interests or intrinsic value of non-human nature – and instead seek to affirm the interests and value of nature as either on par with human interests and values, or as prior or above human interests and values. Against this, social ecologists like Murray Bookchin have criticized deep ecologist’s misanthropy, and instead affirm the possibility – indeed necessity – of human emancipation (against structures of patriarchy, racism, capitalism, the state system, etc.) for ecological flourishing. Among radical, social ecologies, eco-feminism has been a particularly important strand, including the work of Carolyn Merchant, Mary Mellor,

Maria Mies, and Vandana Shiva, especially as it has become more integrated with

Marxist feminist approaches to social reproduction (e.g. Silvia Federici).

Overlapping with the development of radical ecology, but taking place primarily within the academy, we can find the field of political ecology. In the Anglo-American world, political ecology is predominantly used to refer to an interdisciplinary (or transdisciplinary) field of inquiry and practice located approximately at the intersection of geography and anthropology, focusing on the dialectic of human-environment relations particularly as these are shaped by forces of capital, class, and the state.46 One of the first known uses of the concept of political ecology in this context was in a 1972 review article by the Marxist anthropologist Eric Wolf,47 although the framework/approach was more fully fleshed out by later work, such as Piers Blaikie’s

The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries (1985). Through the application of Marxist critique of political economy to understanding ecological dynamics, the development of political ecology further represents an important political and epistemological transition from previous generations of positivist research in the framework of cultural ecology developed by Carl Sauer and others. Political ecology has since become one of the most significant subfields in geography and anthropology, as well as overlapping with cognate fields such as development studies and rural sociology.

46 Outside the English-speaking world, particularly in Latin America, political ecology (ecología política) is less confined to the academy and is better understood as part of the broader social movement/ideology we associate with “environmentalism” (though ecologista política has more of an explicitly socialist or Marxist bent than ambientalista). 47 Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History (1982) also represents one of the earliest and most significant attempts to integrate an anthropological perspective on political economy and commodity production at the frontiers of the early modern capitalist world-system, and is surely worth revisiting from a world-ecological angle (a la Moore’s [2003] reading of Wallerstein’s The Modern World-System). 62

As a disciplinary subfield, political ecology has since branched out to incorporate more explicitly post-structuralist, feminist, decolonial, and other perspectives (including some contention around the relevance of Marxist political economy versus more cultural perspectives [e.g. Biersack and Greenberg, eds]). However, especially relative to political science and environmental politics more generally, Marxist and political economic approaches (which are generally synonymous) are still predominant, or at least on par with their more positivist analogues in cultural ecology. Political ecology can thus be read as overlapping significantly with other radical, critical, and Marxist perspectives in geography and the critical social sciences more broadly, with David Harvey (1974;

1996), Neil Smith (2008[1984]), Joan Martinez-Alier (2014), Michael Watts (2003), Noel

Castree (2003; Castree and Braun, eds 2001), Bruce Braun (Braun 2014; Braun and

Whatmore, eds 2010), Joel Wainwright (2005a, 2005b, 2010a), Cindi Katz (1998), Bina

Agarwal (1992), and Anna Tsing (2015) (among many others) as some of the leading figures.

Lastly, Eco-Socialism refers to a movement that seeks to synthesize Red

(socialist, working class) and Green (environmentalist, radical ecological) theory and praxis. There is a significant amount of overlap between Eco-Socialist and political ecology perspectives, however self-described Eco-Socialists tend to come more from sociological rather than anthropological or geographical backgrounds, such as James

O’Connor, John Bellamy Foster, Ted Benton, and Michael Löwy (again, just to name a few). Many prominent eco-feminists and social reproduction theorists are also ecosocialists, such as Mary Mellor, Maria Mies, and Silvia Federici.

Eco-socialists, like O’Connor, Benton, Foster, Burkett, and Lowy (among others), have made important contributions in overturning/resisting the Frankfurt School’s

“pessimistic” reading of nature-society relations. This revindication of Marx as a fundamentally ecological thinker, alongside ecologically-grounded critiques of the

“actually-existing socialisms,” was an important step in overcoming the self-defeating errors of past Marxism(s) with respect to fostering ecologically sustainable and socially just relations with(in) nature

In their discussion of Eco-Socialism, Foster and Burkett identify what they call

“three stages of eco-socialist analysis” (2017: 1-12). The “first stage” they identify as “a kind of prefigurative phase in the 1960s to early 1980s during the rise of the modern environmental movement, prior to the emergence of ecosocialism as a distinct form of inquiry” (Foster and Burkett 2017: 2). At this point in time, “the convergence of Marxism and environmentalism was often viewed as an organic evolution” as socialists became increasingly concerned with ecological matters, and ecologists began to draw more explicitly upon Marxist historical materialism, as seen in the work of “such notable and varied thinkers” as Barry Commoner, Herbert Marcuse, Paul Sweezy, Raymond

Williams, Richard Levins, and Richard Lewontin (ibid.). However, Foster and Burkett note, the rise of a distinctly “Green theory or ‘ecologism’ in the late 1970s and ‘80s” that included not only radical green thought like deep ecology but also “increasing incorporation of neo-Malthusian ideas into the environmental movement,”48 led to “a

48 Note the role of Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” and The Population Bomb, both published in 1968 (the latter co-published with the American environmentalist organization Sierra Club). 64 growing tendency to see Marxism and environmentalism as opposed to one another”

(2017: 3). This tendency from the “green” side of things, coupled with “enhanced criticism of the environmental performance of Soviet-style societies” (not to mention their human rights abuses), resulted, according to Foster and Burkett, in an “overly defensive and/or breakaway response” by the first-stage ecosocialists. Rather than re- affirming the “natural” or “organic” relationship between Marxism and environmentalism, these latter-day first-stage ecosocialists of the 1980s – and here,

Foster and Burkett add Ted Benton, James O’Connor, Joan Martinez-Alier, John Clark,

Robyn Eckersley, Andre Gorz, “the early Michael Löwy,” “the later Jason W. Moore,”

“the early Ariel Salleh,” Kate Soper, among others – “sought to highlight the presumed failings of Marx, and proceeded to graft Green theory onto Marxism (or in some cases to graft Marxism into Green theory) as part of a process of The Greening of Marxism”

(ibid).49

Foster and Burkett situate themselves as part of second-stage ecosocialism, “also called ecological Marxism,” which they view as the “antithesis” of first-stage ecosocialism insofar as “these second-stage investigations led to the rediscovery of the ecological depths of classical Marxist thought and to the rejection within ecological

Marxism of many of the presumptions of first-stage ecosocialism itself” (2017: 3-4).

Rather than claiming, as first-stage ecosocialists did, that “Marx and Engels (as well as

Marxism in general)… neglected and even violated a Green worldview,”

49 The Greening of Marxism is the title of an influential 1996 volume edited by Ted Benton that included, among other contributions, James O’Connor’s famous essay “The Second Contradiction of Capitalism” with commentaries. Foster and Burkett also note the development of the eco-socialist journal Capitalism Nature Socialism under O’Connor’s leadership as another key development for first-stage ecosocialism. 65

It was discovered [Marx and Engels] had developed a dialectical theory of socio-ecological conditions and crises unequalled in their time, and arguably – where the social sciences are concerned – in ours as well. This extended to radical conceptions of sustainability, and to the definition of socialism/communism in these terms. (Foster and Burkett 2017: 4)

According to Foster and Burkett, by failing to recognize the ecological dimensions inherent (if not already explicit) in Marx and Engels’s own thought, and responding by

“grafting Green conceptions – themselves an eclectic mix of idealistic, dualistic, and formalistic postulates – onto an unexamined, unreconstructed, historical materialism,” the perspectives of first-stage socialism resulted in “at best a kind of ad hoc, patchwork, and not infrequently quasi-Malthusian solution” (Foster and Burkett 2017: 4-5). For Foster and Burkett, a primary task for eco-socialists is to “rediscover – even to excavate in an almost archaeological fashion – certain neglected methodological foundations of classical historical materialism… The objective here is not primarily a scholastic one, but one of developing an ecological materialism organically connected to historical materialism itself” (Foster and Burkett 2017: 10). The task of eco-socialism is thus no different from the task of Marxism more generally: “reconstruction of Marx and Engels’s materialist dialectic… is therefore only meaningful to the extent that it can help us in the development of an ecological-materialist praxis – addressing the ecological challenges and burdens of our historical time” (ibid).

The application of this “richer, more ecologically-nuanced understanding of classical historical materialism… in order to explore our accelerating planetary environmental crisis” is what Foster and Burkett (2017: 10-11) define as third-stage ecosocialist research, which they identify in their own work, as well as that of Naomi 66

Klein, Brett Clark, Richard York, Fred Magdoff, Ariel Salleh, Philip McMichael, Ryan

Wishart, Ian Angus, Patrick Bond, Simon Butler, Victor Wallis, and Chris Williams

(among others). To briefly summarize their conception of eco-socialism: what Foster and

Burkett characterize as the distinction between “first” and “second” stage ecosocialism largely amounts to whether or not Marx’s writings on ecology need to be amended or even discarded in the face of neo-Marxist extensions or post-Marxist criticisms (first- stage ecosocialism), or whether the primary task is to rehabilitate Marx’s original writings and provide additional textual and historiographical interpretation (second-stage ecosocialism). What Foster and Burkett characterize as “third-stage ecosocialism” largely bypasses these philosophical, historiographical, or interpretive questions more towards the application of Marxist thought towards questions of a fundamentally political ecological nature.

Over the course of their careers, few scholars have done more to vindicate

Marxism’s ecological credentials as well as further our critical understanding of the planetary crisis of capitalism than John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett. However, their conceptualization of ecosocialism suffers from a number of serious faults. The first is the peculiar temporality or ordering of the three stages that Foster and Burkett identify, one that is part historical, part substantive in terms of the content of the analysis. In their accounts of the three stages of ecosocialism, the first wave comes first, and is primarily represented in equal measures by scholars who on the one hand end up rejecting Marx as a primary referent for ecosocialist analysis (views that can be attributed to otherwise diverse thinkers including Barry Commoner, Andre Gorz, and Murray Bookchin) and

67 those who on the other hand instead seek primarily to ‘go beyond’ Marx while still retaining a Marxist core (e.g. Ted Benton and James O’Connor).50 Chronologically, second-stage ecosocialism comes after the first and second waves of the first stage, as it frames itself as a critical rehabilitation of “classical Marxism” in the wake of the criticisms of the first stage: Foster and Burkett (2017) frame their approach as an “anti- critique” in the tradition of Marx, Engels, and Luxemburg. The third wave appears again to come chronologically after the first and second waves, but is primarily distinguished less by its temporality but its substantive content, as more or less the application of second-wave analysis to problems and questions ‘out in the world,’ rather than textual interpretation or Marxist historiography per se.

The peculiarity of these distinctions comes to the fore when one realizes that the work and thought of individual thinkers at different points in time can go back and forth among stages: for example, consider their characterization of Jason Moore, whose

“early” work is characterized as “second stage ecosocialism,” ie the type of ecosocialism that Foster and Burkett subscribe to, while his “later” work reverts back to the “first stage.” This point becomes more salient when one realizes that what characterizes the

“third stage” primarily amounts towards extending or developing the analysis of the second-stage, which obviously marks a sharp contrast to the distinction between first and second stage, which defined by a more critical refutation, difference, or separation. Since

50 It’s worth highlighting that Foster and Burkett’s account of the development of the first-stage ecosocialism, ie the ‘two waves’ that I have identified among those who ‘reject’ vs. ‘accept but seek to go beyond’ Marx, is complicated by the fact that there were considerable debates among systems theorists and others regarding “environmental economics” that were happening at least as early as the early (not late) 1970s in which the role and place of Marxist perspectives was not always entirely clear (see, e.g. Daly, ed. 1973). 68 the third stage is seen as deploying the “richer, more ecologically-nuanced understanding of classical historical materialism as uncovered by second-stage ecosocialist analysis,” it logically and temporally follows after the second-stage. And yet, at the same time this three stage analysis all but ignores (or perhaps writes out) the rich tradition of political ecology and environmental geography that developed largely independently of the

‘ecosocialist’ tradition that Burkett and Foster ascribe to. Since the very beginning of the origins of the field, political ecologists have concerned themselves with the relevance and application of Marx’s insights regarding the relations between humans and nature in capitalism to practical problems in the real world, thereby bypassing any supposed distinction between a ‘first’ and ‘second’ stage primarily concerned about historiographical and interpretive questions, and a third stage that is focused on empirical applications. Their failure to acknowledge or engage with political ecology approaches, or Marxist approaches to nature/society relations from human geography more generally, is especially problematic when we recognize the considerable work that these scholars have done for vindicating Marx and Marxism with respect to the environment (e.g.

Smith’s [1990(1984)] critique of Alfred Schmidt).

The second issue with Foster and Burkett’s ecosocialism model is what I consider its anachronistic reading of Marx and ecological Marxism/ecosocialism as a systematic ideology or ideological system, rather than primarily a method or critique of ecological systems thinking (or nature-society relations under capitalism) more generally. Just as

Burkett and Foster seemingly ‘write out’ from the legacy of Marxist ecological thinking perspectives such as those encountered in the field of political ecology and world-

69 ecology, they also ‘write in’ the concept of ‘ecosocialism’ as a mode of describing

Marx’s ecological thought. This tendency is made evident in the English-language version of Kohei Saito’s recent work on Marx’s ecological thought. Originally published in German with the title, Natur gegen Kapital: Marx'Ökologie in seiner unvollendeten

Kritik des Kapitalismus [Nature Against Capital: Marx’s Ecology in the Unfinished

Critique of Capitalism], the English version, published by Foster’s Monthly Review

Press, is entitled Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism. The English version also includes an

Introduction that favorably refers to Foster and Burkett’s ecosocialist model, although the concept of “ecosocialism” is (mostly) absent in the rest of the text. On its own terms,

Saito’s book stands out as one of the most significant contributions to Marxist ecological theory and historiography in recent years, in no small measure due to the influence of the

Neue-Marx Lekture (NML; literally “New Marx Reading”51) research program that has shaped Saito’s own training and experience.52 (Saito’s contributions to Marxist ecology are discussed in more detail below.)

However, there is an irony in the fact that one of the distinguishing features of the

NML is its rejection of “systematic” interpretations of Marx’s writings, a tendency NML figures like Michael Heinrich and Ingo Elbe call “worldview Marxism” that they identify with so-called “traditional” Marxism and Marxists such as Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky

(Elbe 2013). Instead, for the NML, “Marxism” is less the attempt at producing a coherent worldview or philosophical system than a theoretical and practical approach to

51 For more on the NML, see e.g. Heinrich 2012[2004], 2015; Elbe 2013. 52 Saito obtained his PhD in Germany and makes note of the influence of the NML on his research. 70 the critique (and political project of overcoming) capitalist civilization. Perhaps the most notable example is Marx’s own response to contemporary attempts at “systematic” interpretations of his thought: responding to a group of French socialists who began calling themselves Marxistes, Marx famously replied “Je ne suis pas Marxiste” [“I am not a Marxist”] (Heinrich 2015). Thus, the anachronism in calling Marx or Marx’s project “ecosocialism” goes beyond the mere absence of the term or concept in the works of Marx or even the traditional Marxists that Burkett and Foster also seek to rehabilitate, but has more to do with questions of historical interpretation of the nature of Marx’s project, and his (not to mention our own) relation to it. To call Marx’s project

“ecosocialist” in other words is thus to apply not only a systematicity to Marx’s own work that we have good reason to suspect that Marxism himself would have rejected, but it is also to suggest that his ecosocialism can somehow be considered separate or distinct from his broader project. What, in other words, is the difference between Marx’s

“Marxism” and Marx’s “ecosocialism”? Of course, it is precisely the ‘ruthlessly’ critical and dialectical nature of Marx’s own project, his ‘systematic anti-systemism’ we might say, that is so distinctive and which ensures that his legacy for critical theory endures today. In any case, there is perhaps a double fault in Burkett and Foster’s exclusion or separation of political ecology from ecosocialism and the legacy of Marxist historiography in that not only has this field (political ecology, and radical/Marxist geography more generally) made important contributions to the legacy and interpretation and development of Marxism, but Marxist political ecologists, by largely resisting attempts to ‘systematize’ and instead ‘apply’ Marx’s thought to practical, political

71 questions, are arguably more faithful inheritors of Marx’s legacy than self-described

“ecosocialists.”

One final note on Foster and Burkett’s ecosocialism: when viewed in this light, and upon closer examination eventually the distinctions within the stages of ecosocialism begin to crystallize as ‘those who agree with Burkett and Foster’ (second- and third-stage ecosocialism) and ‘those who disagree’ with their account (first-stage ecosocialism).

There is, in other words, no history of non-Marxist ecosocialism after the first stage, nor is there a history of Marxist ecological thinking that develops independently of what they define as ecosocialism. Thus this reads as a self-interested teleology of Marxist historiography, which places Burkett and Foster (and their colleagues) at the center of the historical and textual narrative, while other relevant interlocutors (including their critics) are “outside” or retrograde to the history of ecosocialism; at worst, the effect is to write- out other, relevant perspectives on the legacy and application of Marxist ecology in order to place themselves as the proper inheritors of Marx’s ecological legacy. These problems are further underlined and exacerbated by the at-times personalistic tone and nature of

Foster’s responses to his critics.53

53 Here I am referring to the documented examples of rifts between John Bellamy Foster with James O’Conner and Jason Moore that, besides their grounding in intellectual disagreements, have unfortunately also taken on a personalistic character (see e.g. Proyect 2016; Gellert 2019). While I agree that there are substantial intellectual differences (with real and significant potential for political implications) between these scholars, I concur with Gellert (2019: 116-7): intellectuals who should be allies on the green-red axis have devolved into throwing darts, except one side—represented by Jason Moore, along with his colleagues and students in the world- ecology group (e.g., Ben Marley, Christopher Cox, Raj Patel, et al.)—seems to be the recipient of more numerous and personal attacks than the other side—represented by John Bellamy Foster and his colleagues and students in the metabolic rift group (e.g., Brett Clark, Hannah Holleman, and others). As a result, there is tremendous unrealized potential for a fruitful and useful debate about society, nature, metabolic rift, world-ecology, and so on, and their important relation to 72

Regarding my own approach in this project, I prefer to conceptualize it as Marxist ecology. That is, what I call Marxist ecology is the application of Marx’s (and

Gramsci’s) dialectical, historical, and materialist critique of relations between humans and nature. This approach is dialectical insofar as it seeks to understand and interrogate social and political relations as relations within nature. What we call ‘human’ refers to our species’ distinctive capacity to define ourselves in relation to the rest of nature, reflexively and self-consciously. These relations (between humans and the rest of nature, ie between ‘the human’ and the ‘non-’ or ‘extra-human’), and the method for comprehending and critiquing them, are historical and materialist insofar as they take place across time and space. That is, nature too has a history, and it our species’ unique capacity insofar as we are capable of comprehending our relations within time and space that the truly revolutionary potential for scientific and political theory and praxis may be realized. And yet, it is under our current conditions – and indeed, practically those of our entire existence – that our relations within nature are defined such that we do not (yet) have social (or political) control over the organization or social reproduction of these relations. In the Preface to the First Edition of Capital Vol. 1, Marx writes,

My standpoint, from which the development of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he remains, socially speaking, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them (1972[1863]: 92 [emphasis added])

[ecologically unequal exchange] to capture the unequal ways in which different parts of the world are affected by the (inter)relations of humans and the rest of nature. Full disclosure: in addition to being a mentor and dissertation committee member, I consider Jason Moore a colleague, comrade, and friend, and the world-ecology network that Jason has had a key role in developing was one of the first intellectual-professional circles I became a part of early in my career. 73

Such is the task before us, to produce a conception of the world adequate to the task of reorganizing our relations within nature along ecologically sustainable – and socially just54 - lines. The critique of capitalist political economy is necessarily the critique of capitalist political ecology; to call it “Marxist ecology” is thus to make explicit what might otherwise be ‘implicit’ about Marxist critique, insofar as it is fundamentally about the relations between humans and the rest of nature.55

2.5. Marxist Critique(s) of the Capitalist Climate Crisis

2.5.1 Marxist Critique of Capitalist Political Economy

At its most basic level, Marxist ecology is defined by its critical approach to understanding the relations between humans and nature under capitalism. In other words, what unifies an otherwise disparate set of approaches and perspectives on the planetary crisis is a shared understanding that A) the planetary ecological crisis, of which climate change is perhaps the central (yet not the only) major issue, is fundamentally derived from, and conditioned by, the relations and conditions of capitalism as a way of organizing humans within nature; and B) capitalism, as a socio-ecological system, is

54 In this conception, what is ecologically (and politically) sustainable is (necessarily) socially just, and vice versa – relations that are socially unjust are unsustainable, socially and ecologically, while ecologically unsustainability can only be reproduced due to the exploitation or domination of certain populations (or natures) at the expense of others. 55 There are, of course, notable gaps in my account: certainly, more can (and ought) to be said about the role and contributions from feminist and indigenous perspectives within the field of what we might call “radical ecology” more generally. Additionally, while my own work draws more explicitly upon political ecology and nature-society geography than sociological or anthropological perspectives per se, it is worth highlighting the development of environmental sociology, and in particular a robust research program around environmental justice, by scholars of color like Robert Bullard. Last but not least, and again overlapping with, but to a non-trivial degree distinct from, the political ecology framework discussed previously, there are also the literatures and perspectives of subaltern ecological movements from the global south, sometimes referred to as the “environmentalism of the poor.” 74 inherently unsustainable because of the social and environmental (ecological) contradictions and antagonisms that define its relations. Above all, the central ecological contradiction of capitalism, its core feature that makes capitalism inherently unsustainable, is its core drive for endless expansion and reproduction, ie the endless accumulation of capital or M-C-M` circuit that is the defining feature of capitalism (Marx

1976[1863]).

We thus begin with a general Marxist critique of capitalism as socio-ecological system, after which we can turn to more specific approaches to Marxist ecology, where we can consider their contributions and differences in relation with one another. In order to consider the more specific dynamics of climate politics under capitalism, we need a clear sense of what we mean when we refer to “capitalism” as a social form (or historical formation) and the relations and dynamics characteristic of it. The critical intellectual, and ultimately political, project of Marxism has been defined by attempts to elaborate and clarify the capitalist “laws of motion,” or the underlying structure that organizes social relations and processes in a capitalist society. In a word, capitalist “value” can be understood as intrinsic to that underlying force field, as a “center of gravity” so to speak, which conditions the extent to which social relations unfold in certain directions and according to certain patterns.56 I will say more about capitalist value below, but for now it

56 “To pick up on one of Marx’s favorite metaphors, the law of value acts as a kind of gravitational field, shaping broad patterns, yet allowing significant contingency” (Moore 2015, 52). These naturalistic metaphors are deliberate and intended to reflect Marx’s own naturalistic vocabulary and dialectical understanding of social reality. For more on Marx’s relationship to the natural science of his time, and the influence of Darwin on his social scientific understanding of history, see Foster 2000. It’s also worth considering the extent to which political ecology, as a field, has been historically defined by the application of these insights into how the law of value shapes human-society relations. 75 is important to simply note that the way the very organization of social relations according to the laws of value are themselves predicated upon prior social (political) conditions: that is, the separation (or alienation) of workers from direct control over the means of their social (re)production, and the corresponding class division between these workers and the ownership of those means of the production, namely the capitalist class.

These are not absolute conditions – that is, there will continue to remain considerable variation in class structure, and countervailing forces that resist these ‘laws of motion’ (as derived from more general and specific historical, geographical, and social/political conditions). Nevertheless, together these provide a necessary summary of the two primary conditions or features of capitalist society: A) separation/alienation of workers from direct control or management of the means of their social (re)production; and B) said social relations and processes of (re)production are organized predominantly around the circulation and self-expansion of (capitalist) value, which manifests itself in the form of commodity exchange, and the endless pursuit of ephemeral relative surplus value.57

Considerable debate within the Marxist literature(s) remains regarding when and where exactly we can market the emergence of capitalism – world-systems scholars point to the Early Modern Mediterranean and trans-Atlantic and Pacific trade routes under the

Genoese and Dutch trading empires as the first emergence of societies (and colonial

57 It is an intrinsic, perhaps necessary, feature of Marxism that it is strikingly difficult to find concise definitions of “capitalist social relations,” “capitalism,” “capitalist social formation,” etc., but this two-part definition I think comes close to at least capturing what is ‘necessary’ or ‘essential’ about capitalism and what makes capitalist distinct from other social formations (e.g. feudalism). The definition I have provided is also intended to travel across what might be considered otherwise disparate approaches to defining capitalism from a Marxist perspective, whether it be from the world-systems tradition (e.g. Wallerstein 2011[1974]; Moore 2015), political Marxism (Wood 2002), or the NML tradition (Heinrich 2004), just to name a few. 76 empires) organized according to this law of value, whereas political Marxist historians and theorists argue that the real basis of capitalist society only first emerges in the agrarian relations and class struggles over property rights in Great Britain, much of which took place centuries later (and arguably more or less independently or autonomously) than the trans-Atlantic production and exchange nexus.58 In both cases, scholars agree that the crucial determinant in the transition from pre-modern, non-capitalist relations to a distinctly capitalist social system was the priority assigned to the generation of relative, rather than absolute, surplus value accumulated through the exploitation of labor power, which enabled a qualitative shift in the dynamic, creative, and self-expansive nature of social (re)production. Under pre-capitalist social relations, surplus was generated through absolute increases in productive capacity, such as investments in fixed capital such as land or lengthening of the work day. Capitalism, on the other hand, is distinguished by the extent to which surplus value is generated primarily through relative means, whereby capitalists seek to maximize the exploitation of the labor power in their employ through technological and organizational innovations which maximize the ratio of value that is produced by alienated labor over what is returned to the worker in the form of wages (or other such means of redistributing the surplus, such as through taxation by the state). This leads to exponential increases in productive capacity, due to the structural incentivizing of capitalist investment at the point of production, and the drive to maximize the proportion of the total volume of productive output relative to expended input of labor.

58 For more of the world-systemic side of the argument, see e.g. Wallerstein 2011[1974], Arrighi 2010[1994], and Moore 2017. For more from the political Marxist side, see Brenner 1977; Wood 2002; Teschke 2003. 77

Capitalism still achieves the absolute increases in surplus production as was possible in non-capitalist social formations, but the pursuit of relative surplus value, which is continuous and relentless precisely because the possibility of gains in relative surplus value is so transient and ephemeral, revolutionizes capitalism’s productive capabilities.

To understand the nature of surplus value under capitalism, we must also consider the conception of value.59 In capitalist society, value is comprised of two components, each essential to comprising the commodity form: all commodities, by their nature, have a use value and an exchange value. The use value of a commodity adheres to the materiality and functionality of the commodity itself, and as such is a qualitative relation or characteristic of the commodity: the use value of a coat, following Marx’s famous example, is found in its ability to keep the wearer warm, protect them from the elements, demonstrate a sense of style or social status, etc. At the same time, all commodities have an exchange value as well: the exchange value of that same coat is not to be found in the coat itself, but rather in the abstract equivalence which corresponds with the coat but can only be elicited through its exchange in trade. Again returning to Marx, a coat’s exchange value thus corresponds to what its owner can expect to receive in return for surrendering ownership (ie access to or control over its use value) of the commodity, in exchange for its equivalent (expressed in money). In crucial distinction to use value, exchange value

59 This discussion of Marxist value theory draws heavily upon a particularly spatially- and geographically- inflected reading of Marx, through engagement with the work of David Harvey (2006; 2010) and Marxist geography: see also Henderson 2004, 2009; Robertson and Wainwright 2013. The work of Kojin Karatani has been another key influence, though Karatani’s spatial and exchange-oriented reading of Marx has been criticized by German value-form theorists (Lange 2015). Unfortunately, much of the German value theory and NML works have yet to be translated to English, though there are other important contributions in English (e.g. Elson, ed. 2015[1979]). 78 manifests quantitatively, whether in the form of equivalence of other commodities (e.g.

20 yards of linen, 10 lbs. of tea, etc.), or, as is typically the case in capitalist society, its corresponding amount in money, that “thing with transcendental qualities,” the special commodity whose use value is manifest in its capacity to serve as the “universal general equivalent” (Heinrich 2006[2002]; see also Mann 2013).

What is crucial about this understanding and approach to value is that it represents the dialectical unity of the material and social dimensions of the entire process of commodity production and exchange. Value is an eminently social – and by extension, political – relation because all commodities can only come into being through the exercise of human labor. Nature may be the ultimate source of all value, because it is the source of all use value (that is, all material reality is natural in origin [Marx 1996(1869):

208]), but the commodity form is only possible because of distinctly human, interactions, relations, and processes.

But it is precisely because human labor, that “process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates, and controls the metabolism between himself and nature” (Marx 1976, 283), is the source of all commodity production, and thus is the source of all value generation in capitalism, this means that those who have control over the labor process possess the most important ‘natural resource’ in society, that which is the source of all wealth. In a capitalist society, this power is a feature of the capitalist class, who having alienated the workers from direct control over the means of their own social reproduction, thus oblige the working class through necessity to exchange their control over their own labor power, surrendering it to the capitalist in exchange for wages

79 in the form of the money commodity, with which the working class can then buy back access to food, shelter, health care, and other socially-necessary means and conditions of life.

Herein lies a key relation at the heart of capitalist value: what is socially necessary is conditioned by historical and geographical factors, including most fundamentally the class struggle (over control and access to the means of reproduction, working hours, conditions, and wages, among other things), and yet at the same time is predicated upon the actual material process of labor in time and space, means that value can be defined as socially-necessary labor time. Not only is what is socially necessary determined by social

(read: political) and historical-geographical factors of production, but so is the labor time that it takes to produce each given commodity. Capitalism is such a dynamic and revolutionary social system precisely because it locates the source of surplus value at the point of production in the form of relative surplus value, via innovations that seek to increase the total output of production relative to the inputs, and because the dynamics of market competition impel capitalists to reinvest their surplus value into the production process in order to sustain their own social (re)production as capitalists, rather than being driven out by more efficient and effective innovators in the marketplace.

What is central to the above discussion is the fact that capital values, above all else, that which contributes to its own self-reproduction. Labor power is essential to capitalist reproduction because it is the source of all value;60 capital, in turn, can be

60 Labor power, ultimately, being a part of nature of course – even as it is through labor that we are capable of (re)defining ourselves as distinct from the rest of nature. 80 understood as ‘value in motion’ or the M-C-M` circuit (which I will elaborate below). Of course, capital is not alone in valuing that which contributes to its own self-reproduction: the same can be said for capital’s dialectical counterpart, the worker. One way of understanding the relationship of workers and capitalists (capital personified) are by their structural positioning in the circuits of exchange. Human beings require use values in order to survive: we need the nutritional sustenance of food, the shelter of a home, etc.

This means that when workers engage in relations of exchange, they seek to exchange use values for use values, or goods and services in exchange for other socially-necessary goods and services. In basic schematic terms, this is the C-C circuit, in which one worker exchanges one use value (C, e.g. a coat) with another worker for another use value, different in quality but equivalent in exchange value (e.g. 10 lbs of tea), just as in simple barter exchange. In most societies, but especially capitalist ones, money plays a crucial role in mediating exchange, so instead of the simple C-C circuit of direct, unmediated exchange of use value for use value, money is used as the intermediary, with its own use value manifest in its ability to facilitate the means of exchange (universal general equivalent). So in fact, instead of the C-C circuit, what we have in most circumstances of exchange is C-M-C, whereby workers trade a use value (C – commodity; labor power) in exchange for money (M – money commodity; wages), which they then in turn trade for another use value (C – commodity; food, rent).

But note: under conditions of capitalism (predicated upon the alienation of workers from the means of their social [re]production), the original commodity that the worker exchanges for money is not just any commodity, but the source of all value: their

81 labor-power. In other words, in order to acquire the means by which to be able to access the conditions of their self-reproduction, the worker must sell the use value of their labor power as a commodity (C) to the capitalist in exchange for money (M), with which they can in turn purchase the necessary commodities (C) to sustain themselves. From the standpoint of the worker, this still presents with the same circuit of reproduction: C-M-C.

But what of the standpoint of the capitalist? If labor power is the special commodity most directly associated with the worker, the money is the commodity most directly associated with the capitalist. What this means then is that the capitalist is not defined by their position in the C-M-C circuit (though capitalists too need to acquire use values to survive), but rather the M-C-M` circuit: that is, the capitalist trades the money commodity (M) in exchange with the worker for their commodified labor power (C) in order to acquire more money (M`) than what they began with. Why must the capitalist end with more money than what he began? In short, it hinges on the qualitative/quantitative distinction raised beforehand in the discussion on use and exchange value: unlike other commodities, because its use value is embodied in its equivalence, money can only be distinguished from other money quantitatively, as it can only be defined relatively in terms of having more or less of it. The circuit of capital, in other words, to reproduce itself, must obtain more money at the end of the exchange (M`) than at the beginning of the exchange (M). This is ultimately achieved through the exploitation of the labor process inherent to the capitalist mode of production, as value is returned to the worker in the form of wages, however the amount of value that is returned

82 to the worker as compensation is less than the total amount of value that they generate for the capitalist.

From these relations, we identify the contradictions that are generated: first, the structural exploitation and antagonism between capital and labor; but from an ecological standpoint, more fundamentally, capital’s drive for endless expansion and accumulation.

This discussion about the ‘laws of motion’ of capitalist society has important implications for our understanding of contemporary climate politics because the organization of the contemporary world-system is subject to the same ‘gravitational’ force field of capitalist value.

2.5.2. Marxist Critique of Capitalist Political Ecology

Having established this general framework from which a shared Marxist ecological approach can be developed, we can further turn to more specific approaches to

Marxist ecological thinking that each provide various facets for explaining and understanding the crisis of climate change as a crisis of capitalism. I will consider at least four bodies of work that can be seen as contributing to the Marxist ecology research program, each with some overlap and complementarity as well as important differences and antagonisms: the “second contradiction of capitalism” thesis; the “metabolic rift” framework; the “fossil capital” thesis; and the “world-ecology” research program.

The first approach is James O’Connor’s theory of the “second contradiction of capitalism.” O’Connor situates his work in relation to traditional Marxist theories of the crisis tendencies of capitalism, which focus on the contradiction between the forces and

83 relations of production. This “first” contradiction of capitalism, which creates crises of overproduction of capital, is supplemented with an “Ecological Marxist” theory of capitalism’s “second” contradiction, which identifies a contradiction between the forces and relations of production with the conditions of production, whereby capitalism undermines its own material conditions for reproduction. In other words, whereas the first contradiction manifests periodically realization crises or crises of overproduction, as capitalism is unable to realize the value it has produced through exchange, the second contradiction is defined by the “way that the combined power of capitalist production and relations productive forces self-destruct by impairing or destroying rather than reproducing their own conditions” (O’Connor 1996: 206). While each of these see capitalism as crisis-ridden as well as crisis-dependent, insofar as these crises generate opportunities for capitalist restructuring, they also generate their own resistance movements. For O’Connor this is politically significant insofar as it opens not just one but two potential paths to socialism in late capitalist society, that of the working class movement in response to the first contradiction highlighted by traditional Marxism, but also that of the environmentalist and broader set of new social movements in response to the second contradiction (1996).

O’Connor’s work contributed to the “greening of Marxism” in the late 20th

Century (Benton, ed. 1996). O’Conner’s essay was significant insofar as it contributed to the more general reappraisal and revaluation of Marxist theory for ecology, against the allegations of “Prometheanism” or industrialism by non-Marxist ecologists and

Marxism’s supposed inability to account for the politics of the new social movements by

84 post-Marxists, on the one hand, as well by more traditional or orthodox Marxist accounts that tended to dismiss the new social movements as potential avenues for socialism.

O’Connor’s insights into the ways in which ecological crises also constitute means for capitalism to reconfigure itself is also significant: as Surprise (2018) demonstrates, solar radiation management may be just one means by which capitalism reconfigures itself in the face of climate change. In his seminal essay, O’Connor only briefly mentions

“atmospheric warming” as a manifestation of his second contradiction (e.g. 1996: 207,

221), preferring instead to focus on environmental problems resulting from capitalism in the general, but subsequent authors have expanded upon the second contradiction thesis to explain climate change and our broader global ecological crisis (see, e.g. Robbins,

Hintz, Moore 2014: 105-107; Surprise 2018).

However, perhaps the greatest weakness of O’Connor’s approach lies with its most singular theoretical innovation: as Paul Burkett argues, insofar as the second contradiction (“capital’s destructive use of natural and social conditions”) is derived from the same structural relations as the first contradiction (“capital’s exploitation of labor”),

O’Connor’s distinction between the two is not merely artificial, but actually “unwittingly reproduces this separation” between labor and the “necessary conditions of production”

(1999). In Burkett’s words,

by treating the conditions of production as ‘external’ to capital’s exploitation of labor, O’Connor’s ‘two contradictions dichotomy tends to soften the distinction between the conditions required by capitalist development and the conditions required for human development… the effect… is to artificially divide labor and ecological struggles – with the latter still basically defined as ‘non-class’ struggles. (ibid.)

This error leads us to see labor and environmental movements as “separate paths” rather than both being integral and necessary to (eco-)socialism. As Moore (2015) argues, it is instead better instead to see the social/economic contradictions as moments or dimensions alongside the environmental contradictions as part of broader ecological dialectic of capitalism as (a profoundly unjust and unsustainable) world-producing system, insofar as this can better enable more totalizing forms of ecological theory and praxis.

The second approach to theorizing climate change as a result of the ecological contradictions of capitalism is that of the metabolic rift school of thought associated with

John Bellamy Foster and his students and collaborators, including at Monthly Review where Foster is editor-in-chief. Foster, as noted above, is one of the most important contemporary figures in radical ecology and Marxist theory. His most important work,

Marx’s Ecology (2000), is a watershed text for reading Marx as a profoundly ecological thinker, as Foster provides a systematic account of Marx’s historical materialism as grounded in a naturalism that developed over the course of his lifetime, from his doctoral work on the materialism of the pre-Socratic philosopher Epicurus, to his engagements with the natural philosophy and science of his day, including the work of Charles Darwin and the agricultural chemist Justus von Liebig.61 Foster’s close historical reading of the ecological dimensions of Marx’s thought has inspired the work of other important

61 Marx was a noted admirer of Darwin’s work, and while the two corresponded during their lifetimes, contrary to a commonly cited anecdote, the historical record suggests that Marx never actually offered to dedicate Volume II of Capital to Darwin (evidently his son-in-law made the offer, which Darwin declined) (Fay 1978). 86 historiographers (and ecological theorists) of Marx, such as Saito (2017).62 But perhaps

Foster’s most notable achievement in the field of Marxist ecology has been his

“discovery” of Marx’s “central concept of the ‘metabolic rift’ in the human relation to nature – his mature analysis of the alienation of nature” (2000: ix). Foster reads Marx’s theory of metabolic rift out of two key passages from Capital. The first comes a widely- discussed passage from a section in Volume 3 of Capital entitled “The Genesis of

Capitalist Ground Rent”:

Large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself. The result of this is a squandering of the vitality of the soil, which is carried by trade far beyond the bounds of a single country. (Liebig.) .... Large-scale industry and industrially pursued large- scale agriculture have the same effect. If they are originally distinguished by the fact that the former lays waste and ruins labour-power and thus the natural power of man, whereas the latter does the same to the natural power of the soil, they link up in the later course of development, since the industrial system applied to agriculture also enervates the workers there, while industry and trade for their part provide agriculture with the means of exhausting the soil. (Marx 1981: 949-950; qtd. in Foster 2000: 155; italics mine).

The second passage comes a section from Volume 1 subtitled “Large-Scale Industry and

Agriculture”:

Capitalist production collects the population together in great centres, and causes the urban population to achieve an ever-growing preponderance. This has two results. On the one hand it concentrates the historical motive force of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its

62 Saito is also a contributor to the MEGA (Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, the Marx-Engels Collected Works) and is primarily responsible for editing Marx’s notebooks on science and natural history, which are said to comprise approximately a half of Marx’s later notebooks (ie those written after the publication of Volume One of Capital in 1863) (Saito 2017). 87

constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition [or the lasting fertility of the soil... But by destroying the circumstances surrounding that metabolism... it compels its systematic restoration as a regulative law of social production, and in a form adequate to the full development of the human race .... [A]ll progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress toward ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility .... Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the technique and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth– the soil and the worker. (Marx 1976[1867]: 637-8; qtd in Foster 2000: 155-6; italics mine)

From these two passages, Foster identifies “the central theoretical concept of a ‘rift’ in the ‘metabolic interaction between man and the earth,’ that is, the ‘social metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life,’ through the ‘robbing’ of the soil of its constituent elements, requiring its ‘systematic restoration’” (2000: 156). For Foster and colleagues,

Marx’s concept of the metabolic rift is not only central to explaining the ecologically destructive tendencies of capitalism’s relationship with labor and land through its manner of organizing agriculture and industry, but the “rift” is the defining feature of capitalism’s relationship with nature. As Foster, Clark, and York note in the opening to The

Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth,

The ecological rift referred to in the title of this book is the rift between humanity and nature. The world is really one indivisible whole. The rift that threatens today to tear apart and destroy that whole is a product of artificial divisions within humanity, alienating us from the material-natural conditions of our existence and from succeeding generations… [A] deep chasm has opened up in the metabolic relation between human beings and nature – a metabolism that is the basis of life itself. The source of this unparalleled crisis is the capitalist society in which we live. (2010: 7; italics in original)

The metabolic or ecological rift63 produced by the capitalist mode of production thus explains not only the crises that confront rural agro-industrial ecologies, as “Capitalist production… undermin[es] the original sources of all wealth-the social and the worker”

(Marx 1976[1867]: 637-8; qtd in Foster 2000: 155-6), but it also can be used to explain ecological crises of capitalism more generally, including (but not limited to) biodiversity loss, the nitrogen cycle, and climate change (Foster, Clark, and York 2010; see also Clark and York 2005).

Foster and colleagues’ metabolic/ecological rift approach has a number of virtues, including its generalizability. However, by my reading there are two primary faults with this approach, one interpretive and another political.64 The interpretive fault with John

Bellamy Foster’s reading of the metabolic rift in Marx’s writings lies, as I see it, with the tendency (by Foster and others) to refer to “Marx’s theory of metabolic rift” rather than describing it as the “Marxist” theory of metabolic rift, or more specifically, “Foster’s” theory of metabolic rift (since Foster, after all, is the one who is responsible for coining

63 The concepts of “metabolic rift” and “ecological rift” are, for Foster, Clark, and York (2010) at least, interchangeable, though Foster in his solo-authored works tends to use “metabolic rift” almost exclusively. Clark and York (2005) in their discussion of “carbon metabolism” refer to a “biospheric rift” in the Earth’s carbon system. 64 It is of course worth acknowledging that other interpretive – and by extension, political – criticisms have been made of Foster and colleagues’ metabolic rift framework, including on onto-epistemological (metaphysical) grounds, most notably by Jason Moore and colleagues working in the world-ecology research program. For what it’s worth, I find myself closer to the world-ecology framework for reasons elaborated further below, even if I am not entirely convinced by some of its metaphysical presuppositions (ie the tendency towards monism, rather than dialectics) and other features (e.g. “negative value”). I would also agree, tentatively, that there is likely a close (if not causal) relation between Foster and colleagues’ tendency towards a more “closed” reading of Marx and Marxism, and their hostility towards more “open” and heterodox readings of Marx/ism (e.g. Moore [2015] frequently notes non-Marxist intellectual influences, such as Fernand Braudel, Carolyn Merchant, and Lewis Mumford, in the development of the world-ecology research program). While such metaphysical and political disagreements are to a certain extent necessary/unavoidable – indeed, they can perhaps be considered constitutive of Marxist ecology’s status as a scientific research program – I prefer to reiterate Gellert’s (and Moore’s) call for a more productive engagement among these positions. 89 the phrase and popularizing it). Consider, for example, not only that in the passages cited above, the term “metabolic rift” does not actually appear in the text, but the fact that the term “metabolic rift” itself presumes a particular translation of Marx: in contrast to the

Fernbach translation in which Marx’s German term Stoffwechsel is rendered as

“metabolism” (Foster also defines the term as “material exchange” [2010: 157]), an alternative formulation renders the English equivalent as “interchange” and uses the work

“break” instead of “rift” (Marx 1999[1894]: 588).65

By attributing the “metabolic rift” as theory and concept directly to Marx, and thereby eliding his own role in the production of the concept and theory in Marxist ecology, Foster is in effect making an appeal to authority regarding the systematicity and cohesion of Marx’s thought as a whole. In other words, by displacing his own authorship in the ideological production of the metabolic rift by attributing the concept, theory, and framework directly to Marx, Foster is thereby able, somewhat ironically, to use this as leverage when responding to critics. This has political effects, whether the criticisms are seen as coming from ‘within’ (ie from fellow Marxists, such as Jason Moore) or

‘without’ (from non-Marxists), Foster and colleagues use the figure and corpus of

“Marx” (and to a lesser extent, “Marx and Engels”) to make specific claims on behalf of their particular readings of Marx. The result is that substantive debates over questions of

65 Here is the first half of the passage from “The Genesis of Capitalist Ground Rent” quoted above from the version at Marxists.org (it is unclear who the translator is): [L]arge landed property reduces the agricultural population to a constantly falling minimum, and confronts it with a constantly growing industrial population crowded together in large cities. It thereby creates conditions which cause an irreparable break in the coherence of social interchange prescribed by the natural laws of life. As a result, the vitality of the soil is squandered, and this prodigality is carried by commerce far beyond the borders of a particular state (Liebig). (Marx 1999[1894]: 588; italics mine) 90 method, epistemology, ontology, and, yes, political implications and political strategy devolve unnecessarily into debates over “which” or “whose” reading of Marx will win out, with the effect that what might otherwise be seen as intra-Marxist debates devolves into partisanship and sectarianism.66 In other words, the debates end up becoming needlessly personalized and, even as someone relatively well-versed in Marxology, often appear obscure as medieval debates over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Such tendencies among metabolic rift theorists are symptomatic of what Michael

Heinrich calls “worldview Marxism” (2012[2004]: 24-27) or what Werner Bonefeld and colleagues call “closed Marxism” Against this desire to defend Marx (or “traditional

Marxism” or “orthodox Marxism”) as a systematic ideology, it is far better to read Marx

(and Marxism) in and through their interlocutors, as a pluralistic, open-ended, and highly contestable political tradition as well as method (critique) and standpoint, oriented towards producing knowledge about the world in order to change it.

I have already alluded to some of the political effects of this interpretation of the metabolic rift framework we find in the work of John Bellamy Foster and others, insofar as it contributes to an unnecessary or counterproductive politicization of ecological

Marxism (or a personalization/sectarianism of what are otherwise philosophical questions), but I also wish to highlight some of the other political tensions found in this reading of Marx. Put broadly or generally, this more orthodox and traditional theoretical reading of Marx/Marxism/ecosocialism tends to reduce or collapse ecological movements

66 As Gellert (2019) and others (e.g. Proyect 2016) describe, much of this has played out in behind-the- scenes editorial politics, but currently plays out more frequently online in venues like Facebook and Ian Angus’s “Climate and Capitalism” website. 91 and struggles to the socialist/worker’s movement more generally, rather than seeing both as necessary components of an integral unity. Contrary to O’Connor, who sees the labor/socialist movement and environmentalist/new social movements as two separate paths to socialism, and contrary to post-Marxists like Laclau and Mouffe who reduce class struggle to identity politics, Foster and other traditional/orthodox Marxists tend to subsume or subordinate ecological movements and struggles (as well as other movements, such the new social movements O’Connor and others describe, if not outright dismissing them) to the labor/socialist movement. Far better, as I argue and develop further in the next section, to see struggles over labor and social reproduction as different fronts and at different sites in a broader struggle for an alternative hegemony over the metabolic relations between humans and nature. While movements and struggles over the 8-hour workday, democratic management of the industrial factory, traditional labor union organizing, etc. are in fact critical for human emancipation, their value is strategic and their conditions are historically determined by the character of capitalist reproduction. In other words, it is not enough to privilege urban proletariat or Marxist political party as the prime mover in revolutionary politics at the expense of other movements, but rather to situate these alongside other movements, struggles, and organizational forms, whose prioritization or importance must be considered according the historical and strategic conditions, rather than asserted as an a priori.

The functional theory of the state follows from this political reductionism: orthodox or traditional Marxism tends to see the state apparatus as an “agent” of the class relations of society. Hence, the capitalist state’s relationship with nature is one predicated

92 upon domination (or imperialism), and political strategy is defined, in the short term, by a revolutionary politics to seize state power, redirect its energies in a more ecologically sustainable and socially just manner, and ultimately overcome capitalism (thereby superseding the state). By contrast, as in the Gramsci-Poulantzas conception of the state as the very terrain or grounds on which political struggles (of domination, resistance, and ultimately, emancipation) take place, there can be greater appreciation for the ecological contradictions of the capitalist state and the more particular features of state authority, specifically the anti-ecological nature of sovereignty, which is both a necessary condition and feature of the capitalist mode of production and relation with(in) nature. This reductionist conception of eco-socialist politics and movements coupled with functionalist conceptions of the state can be seen as contributing to the uncritical ecological assessments of the “actually existing socialisms” – for example, Magdoff and

Foster (2010) point to Venezuela and Bolivia as positive exemplars for ecosocialist political strategy and praxis, on the basis of their avowedly socialist movements and leaders (and eco-friendly rhetoric), while failing to adequately account for the ecological contradictions of their state projects, based on petro-socialism and extractivism (Bond

2012; Andreucci 2018).

The third framework to consider is Andreas Malm’s analysis of fossil capital.

Whereas Foster’s (and Saito’s) primary contributions to ecological Marxist historiography come predominantly in the form of intellectual history (ie textual reconstruction and interpretation of Marx’s own writing on political ecology), Malm’s historical focus is primarily oriented towards applying his Marxist framework towards

93 analyzing the origins of the climate crisis in class struggles between workers and capitalists over the conditions of production. More specifically, Malm’s central thesis in

Fossil Capital is that the grounding of our contemporary ecological crisis in our dependency on fossil fuels can be traced through the switch from riverine hydraulic power to coal-fired steam power in England in the 19th Century, which took place not because coal was “cheaper” than water in strictly ‘economic’ terms, but because exploiting coal enabled capitalists greater ability to discipline and control labor (ie it was a more fundamentally ‘political’ economic transition).67 Thus, for Malm, the origins of the climate crisis are located in the historical and geographical contingencies of class conflict at the sites of production that have produced the specifically “fossilized” form of capitalism that has defined our modern economy – and warmed our planet – not from the materiality of carbon energy (Mitchell 2011), humanity as a geological force (Yusoff

2013), or human nature in the abstract.68

Malm’s contributions are not only historical, but theoretical and practical as well.

Malm argues that in capital’s drive towards self-accumulation, “fossil fuels become a necessary material substratum for the production of surplus-value” as they enable massive leaps in productive capabilities, and thereby have become “the general lever for surplus value production” (2016: 288-9). In the race to accumulate capital (as surplus value, and predominantly via competition and innovation in the pursuit of relative surplus

67 This distinguishes Malm’s reading of the energy transition from that of most classical (e.g. E.A. Wrigley) and contemporary (e.g. Kenneth Pomeranz) accounts, which Malm calls “the Ricardian-Malthusian paradigm” (2016: 24). 68 Malm, is a strong critic of the Anthropocene thesis, at least in its uncritical form (see e.g. Malm and Hornborg 2014; Malm 2015), a similarity he shares with Jason Moore (who credits Malm with coining the term “Capitalocene”). For a Marxist defense of the Anthropocene concept, see Angus 2016. 94 value), fossil fuels become a necessary part of the production process in general. By extension, CO2 pollution resulting from the combustion of fossil fuels also becomes a necessary part of the production process as well: although “combustion of fossil fuels in their solid form and the consequent release of CO2 do not in themselves generate any value for the capitalist, they are material requirements for value creation” (Malm 2016:

289). Capitalism’s dependency on fossil fuels may have originated as a contingent result of class struggle, but it has now become a determinant factor in its reproduction. This then has critical political implications: resisting the production and consumption of fossil fuels, and the return to a predominance of low-carbon, renewable energy sources in nature is not just necessary for mitigating our ecological crisis, but for resisting and overcoming capitalism altogether.69

Here we can bring in the fourth framework for Marxist ecology to consider, Jason

Moore’s world-ecology. Moore also takes a historically-informed approach to the crisis, but insists that in order to understand its origins it is not sufficient to begin with

England’s industrial revolution, but rather we must go further back to the “long 16th

Century” and the early development of a capitalist world-system under the aegis of the

Dutch Republic (Moore 2003). It is during this time period where we can first observe the quantitative and qualitative leaps and bounds in production that are a defining feature of

69 Malm’s framework for understanding sustainable energetic alternatives to fossil fuels is organized around ‘the flow’ of energy, such as wind and water, which originate with the sun. Though fossil energy also is ultimately derived from the sun (via the accumulation of solar energy converted into biomass through photosynthesis that is the ultimate material basis of fossil fuels), it is qualitatively distinct from energy derived directly from the flow due to the time-space compression that has given it its form. For Malm, resisting and overcoming the hegemony of fossil capital thus means returning to the flow (wind and hydro) as a basis for society’s energy needs (2016: 366-388). 95 capitalist expansion (Moore 2015: 182-7; Moore 2017a). Moore traces these revolutionary transformations in the quantities (and qualities) of material production through the circuits of production and exchange among Europe and the African and

American colonies, as new means of organizing and controlling labor (including the commercial slave trade and encomienda system) both enabled and driven by a new end of production, production for its own sake (“the priority of the endless accumulation of capital” [Wallerstein 2004: 92]), and its resultant exponential increases in material flows of commodities (including but not limited to sugar, metals, and, human beings) (Moore

2010a, 2010b).

Central to these corresponding shifts of production and accumulation is a key feature of capitalist value production, which Moore argues is not merely predicated upon the exploitation of (human) nature qua labor, but the appropriation of human and extra- human nature(s) within the ever-expanding circuits of capitalist reproduction. For Moore, the production of (surplus) value necessary for capital accumulation depends on the capture of ‘unpaid’ sources of wealth production, both human (e.g. unpaid labor of social reproduction inside the household) and extra-human (e.g. land and other “natural resources” acquired through colonization or other forms of what Marx calls “primitive accumulation” [1976(1863)]). Importantly, the appropriation and exploitation of human and extra-human natures is as much a symbolic and ideological process as it is material, occurring (to borrow a tenuous metaphor from the early Marx) not only at the ‘base’ of economic production, but throughout the ‘superstructure’ of capitalist society, including its social, cultural, etc. institutions and apparatuses. More specifically, the process of the

96 expansion and development of capitalism has been made possible, and subsequently reproduced, a corresponding conception of the world that Moore calls Cartesian dualism

(Moore 2015: 19-20). In other words, the expansion of capitalism was not only accompanied, but made possible, by a conception of the world that sees “humans” and

“society” as somehow separate or distinct from a capital-N “Nature” in the abstract, simultaneously parceling the world into categories and units that could be rendered equivalent and exchangeable through abstraction while ordering these relations in hierarchies that could further enable domination and exploitation (2015).70

Thus, for Moore, capitalism is not just an economic system or a social system, “it is a way of organizing nature” (2015: 2). For Moore and the world-ecology project, this has important theoretical and practical dimensions. According to Moore and others working in the world-ecology framework, Cartesian dualism is not just descriptive of bourgeois ideology, but most of the predominant forms of modern thought, including much of Western science and the more general, ideological and disciplinary distinctions between the “natural” and “social” sciences and the humanities. More specifically, Moore and other world-ecologists are particularly critical of “Anthropocene” discourse, which they argue mistakenly assigns causal responsibility for the planetary crisis upon

“humanity” in the abstract, thereby ‘naturalizing’ the ‘social,’ ‘historical,’ and ‘political’ dimensions of the crisis and thus displacing responsibility away from the capitalist system and its hegemonic classes. Notably, most environmentalisms, and even radical

70 Such that non-European peoples and lands could be considered both “less than fully human” and “closer to Nature,” and thus in need of rational (colonial) subjugation. 97 green and ecosocialist thought are subject to these tendencies towards dualism as well.

Against the tendencies of “Green Arithmatic” that attempts to fuse “nature + society” (as in Anthropocene science) or “Red + Green” theory and praxis (as in ecosocialism),

Moore’s world-ecology framework insists upon a more adequately “dialectical” theory and praxis, one that takes the relational totality of humans-in-nature (and its dialectical counterpart, nature-in-humans),71 as opposed to humans (or society) and nature (Moore

2015: 33-35). The term world-ecology thus not only signals the project’s relationship with world-systems analysis, as Moore’s work was initially inspired and developed out of ecological reading of Wallerstein’s history and theory of capitalism (Moore 2003), but also the unit of analysis: capitalism as world-ecology, the capitalist world-ecology, the web of life, oikeios, these are some of the terms used to refer to the subject of world- ecological critique. The goal of the world-ecological project is to produce an adequately dialectical and unified framework of analysis for studying the dialectical unity of human- nature relations, including under current conditions of historical capitalism, towards the end of reorganizing those relations in a more ecologically sustainable, and socially just, manner.

This is distinct from those ecosocialist perspectives that emphasize a more profound separation or ‘rift’ between humans and nature. The world-ecological approach resists language like Capitalism’s War on the Earth (Foster, Clark, and York 2010) and instead emphasizes that capitalism is merely another way of “producing” and

“organizing,” albeit one absolutely predicated upon profound injustice, exploitation,

71 Or what Marx called “external” and “internal nature” 98 domination, and violence. More contentiously, Moore and fellow world-ecologists are critical of “natural limits” thinking, including that of the Stockholm School,72 which they argue are symptomatic of ‘catastrophic’ thinking as well. Such limits thinking, and the resulting catastrophism, not only underestimate the socially and politically contingent nature of ecosystemic limits – that is, what will ultimately decide the inevitable transition from our current capitalist system to its successor (whatever that may be) will ultimately be driven by social and political forces in nature, and not any given set of natural thresholds (whether they be temperature rises or PPM of CO2 in the atmosphere) – but have counterproductive political effects, insofar as they inhibit effective political organizing and action. According to Moore, what we are observing with the planetary ecological crisis is not a metabolic rift as much as a metabolic shift (Moore 2017c): as a historical formation and mode of organizing nature, capitalism’s remarkable resiliency has been predicated upon its ability to adapt to finding and producing new sources of value at the frontiers of commodification.73 And while we are observing capital’s expansion of the circuits of value into these new domains of commodification, which includes not just the financialization and neoliberalization of society in general (e.g. education, health care, etc. in particular) but the development of new forms of extracting value from nature (e.g. fracked natural gas, commercialized wind and solar energy but also commodified greenhouse gas emission permits in cap and trade schemes), we also observe the resulting counter-movements in the forms of social and ecological resistance

72 https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html 73 This is in fact at the heart of Moore’s value theory, and relates back to his concept of appropriation: “commodity frontiers” (or frontiers of commodification) are a primary source of capital’s dynamism, as capitalism expands and seeks new sources of value. 99 to capital’s mode of producing and organizing nature. This is what Moore calls “negative value,” which he defines as “the accumulation of limits to capital in the web of life” that inhibit the “restoration” of the material basis of capitalism (2015: 277), predicated as it is to access and exploitation of “Cheap Nature.”74 Because the “limits” and contradictions of capital are ultimately internal to capitalism as world-ecological system, we are already in the midst of an epochal “metabolic shift” that may spell the end of the capitalist world- ecology, as the accumulation of “negative value” is provoking a terminal crisis of value production that capitalism may not be able to overcome by the end of the century. That is, unless capitalism is capable of successfully implementing a variety of necessary “fixes”

(including but not limited to the likely probability of geoengineering solutions to global warming) to ensure a stable and continuous flow of capital accumulation, capitalism may not last until the end of the century as the predominant mode of organizing the social reproduction of nature on a planetary scale – at least not on Earth that is.75 Interestingly enough, Moore is relatively optimistic about the prospects for (ecosocialist) transition, noting that, contrary to popular wisdom, many prior civilizational transitions (e.g. the fall of Rome) led to better material conditions for the majority of people and ecosystems (ie. those living apart from Roman civilization). In any case, there is space and possibility for humans to organize and act alongside the many forms of natural resistance, such as the

74 Moore identifies four types of “Cheap Nature” (or “Four Cheaps”) that capitalism requires for its self- reproduction (accumulation of capital): labor-power, food, energy, and raw materials (2015: 17). Increasing costs and/or declining returns on investment among any of the Four Cheaps creates conditions for capitalist crisis: ours is a time defined by increasing “costs” among all four. 75 In other words, we may consider that for capitalism to endure, if it is unable to geoengineer or otherwise generate a fix for the climate crisis, may be forced to colonize extra-terrestrial space. 100

“superweeds” that are evolving to escape industrial agriculture’s grasp (Moore 2015:

283-6).

By bringing in Moore and the world-ecology framework, we can now review these four approaches to Marxist ecology, clarifying their points of similarity and difference, while highlighting key contributions as well as identifying remaining contradictions, gaps, or questions, towards the end of illuminating emancipatory eco- political theory and praxis.76 Without downplaying the significant philosophical and methodological differences between them, I find it more productive to see their differences as predominantly complementary, rather than contradictory. I consider the central means of comparing the approaches as regarding their understanding and interpretation of the ecological and political dimensions of the contemporary climate crisis of the Anthropocene (or, what Malm and Moore argue should be more properly considered the “Capitalocene,” “an ugly term for an ugly phenomena” [Moore, ed 2016:

5]). What first matters for our purposes is that these Marxist ecologists agree on a fundamental diagnosis of the planetary ecological crisis: the crisis is not derived from some innate or intrinsic characteristic of “man” as a biological or even political animal per se,77 but rather it is a product of the distinctly social, historical, and political relations

76 Note how this means of classifying Marxist approaches to ecology on the basis of their implications for our understandings of theoretical, scientific, and practical matters differs from Foster and Burkett’s (2016) typology of the three stages of eco-socialism on account of their respective relationships to Marx’s own writings. Gellert (2019) takes a similar approach, though his emphasis is more on philosophical (ontological and epistemological) dimensions, and he also includes the framework preferred by his mentor Stephen Bunker, “Ecologically Unequal Exchange” (EUE), alongside those of Foster and Moore. 77 This is, we might say, the uncritical Anthropocene thesis, a myth which many critical scholars across the social sciences and humanities, Marxists and non-Marxists alike, have spent much time and energy dispelling (e.g. Malm and Hornborg 2014; Cox 2015). 101 of our contemporary conditions within a system of an increasingly globalized capitalism.

In other words, Marxist ecology has contributed to the study of climate politics a critical diagnosis of the problem, that capitalism and the specific form of its relations with nature is responsible for generating the planetary ecological crisis of climate change and the

Anthropocene/Capitalocene. Capitalism is a system that is predicated upon the limitless exploitation of nature(s), human and otherwise. For humans and the Earth, capital’s

Framework Key Figures Key Concepts Nature of Key Questions to Contributions Each Approach Second James Second contradiction Theoretical; What’s the nature Contradiction O’Connor; of capitalism; crises Economic- of distinction of Capitalism Capitalism of over/under- environmental between (or how Nature production sociology distinct are) the Socialism two contradictions? And the two paths to socialism? Metabolic John Bellamy Metabolic/ecological Theoretical; Is Marxism a Rift Foster; rift; ecosocialism historical- closed system? Monthly textual (history Review of ideas); environmental sociology Fossil Capital Andreas Fossil capital; prime Historical- Is a non- or post- Malm mover geographical fossil capitalism (Dobb- possible? Brenner); Theoretical World- Jason Moore; Oikeios; humanity-in- Historical- How does Ecology World- nature; “nature” vs. geographical “negative value” Ecology “Nature”; dualism (World- relate with Research systems “value”? Is there Network analysis); adequate Theoretical differentiation among eco- political forms (e.g. capital, empire, racism)? Table 1: Contributions to Marxist Ecology

102

intrinsic drive towards endless reproduction and accumulation has devastating material consequences, in the form of the exhaustion of “natural resources” (again both human and extra-human), as well as the more directly physical, symbolic, and structural violence of capitalism’s regimes of exploitation, appropriation, and accumulation, including centuries of colonization, slavery, racialized and sexualized oppression, and other forms of state and extra-state violence.

Beyond this common acknowledgement which underpins all such Marxist ecological analyses, there are competing explanations regarding what might be considered the ‘causal pathway’ of the crisis, which in turn has important implications for what is politically necessary for resolving it. In terms of approach, we may distinguish the more historically-grounded approaches of Malm and Moore from those of O’Connor, on the one hand, whose two contradictions thesis “provides us with a general theory… pitched at a high level of abstraction” (Benton, ed. 1996: 187), as well as Foster on the other, whose metabolic rift thesis was originally developed out of textual exegesis and reconstruction of Marx’s own writings on capitalist development and human-nature relations (2000), later applied as a general theory (e.g. Foster, Clark, and York 2010). For

Malm, the climate crisis is best understood as a result of specific class struggles during the fossil-fueled industrialization of England in the “long 19th Century,” which in turn shaped the subsequent expansion of capitalism throughout the rest of the world. Thus, for

Malm, the climate crisis is primarily understood as a result of the specifically “fossilized” nature of modern capitalism, derived from class struggles at the site of production and the

103 subsequent need for fossil energy to fuel capitalism. Moore, like O’Connor and Foster, defines the climate crisis within a more general theory of ecological crisis at a planetary scale, however the means of identifying the particular dimensions and sources of the crisis further distinguish the ecosocialist and metabolic rift from the world-ecological frameworks: as noted above, ecosocialists like Foster and Angus tend to define the ecological crisis in terms of capitalism’s threats to the “natural limits” of the Earth system

(Foster, Clark, and York 2010; Angus 2016). This framework in turn dovetails closely

(yet critically) with the narratives of Earth systems scientists, who date the onset of the

“Anthropocene” from the mid-20th Century onwards during the “Great Acceleration,” as various geophysical “golden spikes” due to “anthropogenic” activity, including but not limited to radical changes in the rates of atmospheric CO2 and temperature levels, biodiversity loss and the 6th Great Extinction, mass production and accumulation of synthetic materials (such as plastics), and planetary register of nuclear isotopes from atomic bombs.

On the other hand, Moore and the world-ecology framework, like Malm’s fossil capital narrative, argue that the origins of the ecological crisis must be traced much earlier, to the development of capitalism itself. However, here Moore and Malm differ on grounds that track broader debates in Marxist historiography regarding the origins of capitalism. While both Malm and Moore are both trained as historical geographers,

Malm’s narrative, like that of Robert Brenner (and Maurice Dobb), emphasizes the more

‘internal’ dynamics of capitalism and its resulting crises, which can ultimately be traced to class struggles over production and exchange in England. Moore’s approach, by

104 contrast, draws predominantly from the world-systems tradition of Immanuel

Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi, and others, and emphasizes the more ‘external’ dimensions of capitalist development. From the world-ecology framework, the onset of capitalism can be traced much earlier than the 18th Century and across a much larger geographical space, from timber and peat frontiers of Northern Europe to the sugar and slavery nexus of the South Atlantic, evolving with the shifting dynamics of commodity frontiers and colonization. Accordingly, for Moore, the ‘fossilized’ nature of the current crisis is obviously relevant due to the greenhouse effect and the implications that global warming will continue to have for social reproduction within the web of life, yet we cannot overlook the other ecological dimensions of capitalism’s drive to self-reproduce, which has produced multiple eco-political regimes of accumulation and energy. These capitalist ecological regimes include a reliance on non-fossilized carboniferous sources during the hegemony of the Dutch Republic (timber and peat in particular), and, as we are beginning to see, capitalists are already increasingly turning towards “alternative” sources of energy (wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, etc.). Elite convergence around a

“Green New Deal” in other words can be yet another means by which capital reconfigures itself, and not merely an impediment to the growth economy, which brings us back to O’Connor’s prescient observations about state responses to the second contradiction. A “post-fossil” capitalism, one perhaps predicated upon some combination of eco-modernism, a greened neoliberalism and/or green Keynesianism, is thus not only theoretically possible but likely to be riven with as many (or even more) social and ecological contradictions than its predecessors, particularly in the face of the crises to

105 come. In other words, both the possibility and feasibility of a post-fossil capitalism is a key question that divides Malm and Moore, as well as the necessary means of realizing the transition to (eco-)socialism. For the ecosocialists like O’Connor and Foster as well as

Malm’s more orthodox reading of history and class struggle, the traditional sites of class struggle and organization among the working class are still primary, even if environmentalist and other “new” social movements may have a functional autonomy that can facilitate socialist struggle on a broader scale. Moore and the world-ecology approach, on the other hand, suggests not only more direct engagement with a broader conception of the “working class” that includes a more direct role for, for example, unwaged reproductive laborers, but even extra-human life within the capitalist world- ecology,78 which among other philosophical characteristics puts the world-ecology framework closer to the political ontology of the new materialists.79

2.5. Conclusion: Towards Hegemony as an Ecological Relation

Of these four approaches to Marxist ecology discussed here, the world-ecology framework offers the most insights for conceptualizing the politics of the climate crisis in large part precisely because of the scope of its analysis: capitalism as a world-producing system. At a fundamental level, the capitalist ecological crisis of climate change, not to mention the other intersecting crises we associate with the Anthropocene/Capitalocene, is

78 See the above discussion about the “superweed” effect; Moore also favorably cites (without quite endorsing) Hribal’s (2003) argument that non-human animals should also be considered part of the working class. 79 Many observers have noted Moore’s world-ecology can be considered more of a “monist” than a “dialectical” framework (e.g. Gellert 2019); for a sympathetic reading of the compatibility of historical materialism with the new materialisms, see Edwards 2010. 106 the moment of globalization par excellence, the culmination of decades of expansion and consolidation of a capitalist system whose effects are now being rendered at not merely a global, but a planetary scale.80 The nature of capitalism and its laws of motion have not only shaped but actively produced new forms and relations with the Earth. Capitalism too is part of the Earth’s natural history, yet the crisis tendencies inherent to the asocial sociality it produces and is predicated upon are what give its anti-ecological (ecologically unsustainable) nature.

This is not to say that there are not limits and gaps to the existing world- ecological framework. I see at least two: first is the unclear nature of “negative value” and its relationship with value, on the one hand, and eco-political movements on the other. On the one hand, it is unclear to what extent negative value is value, which is probably likely related to its unclear relation with the Marxist conception of rent. On the other hand, if eco-political movements (like movements for indigenous territorial sovereignty or climate justice) as well as non-human ecological resistance (like

“superweeds”) can both be considered sources of negative value, does this not obscure the political subjectivity of such human-driven movements and their possibility for realizing a truly anticapitalist politics? In any case, more attention to the specific roles and distinct capacities of political subjectivity (ie the specifically political nature of the category of the human) is needed. The other limit, which I see as related to the prior, is the need for more careful differentiation among the various eco-political forms that

80 Whereas the “global” is, ultimately, an abstraction (even if it is a real abstraction, one with a material basis and material effects), the “planetary” is concrete insofar as it refers to the Earth itself. 107 produce and reproduce relations in nature. Reading world-ecologists one gets a sense that capitalist value is the only political end or source of the production of nature. For example, Parenti uses a world-ecological framework to argue for the critical role of the

“environment-making” state apparatus in the production of value in the early history of the United States. However, there are ends to the production of nature, driven by forces that are only indirectly valuable (if at all) to capital, that have a critical role to play as well: as Bruce Braun notes (drawing upon Donna Haraway), “the production of nature ‘is not reducible to capitalization or commodification” (2000: 38-39).

In any case, what is missing from these accounts is more careful attention to the specific role and mediation of the state system and anti-systemic forces in the capitalist world-ecology. Why does this matter? In the context of the planetary ecological crisis, we need a conception of the political that is adequate to the task of not only comprehending the systemic political response to manage and mitigate the crisis, but theorizing the politics necessary for resolving the crisis. That is, we need an ecological critique of the politics of the capitalist state system.

For these purposes, in the next chapter I turn to the intellectual resources provided by Antonio Gramsci and his philosophy of praxis, organized around his critical conception of hegemony. I argue that an ecological reading of Gramsci’s political thought provides an understanding of the way in which politics are defined by struggles for hegemony over the organization of social reproduction within nature. This ecological conception and framework of hegemony can thus be used to understand both the systemic political movement of capitalism in global climate politics – also known as climate

108 governance – as well as the climate crisis’s anti-systemic movement of movements – also known as climate justice. However, in order to adequately grasp the anti-ecological

(ecologically unsustainable) nature of the state system, I argue that we need to supplement this Gramscian ecological framework with an ecological critique of state power qua sovereignty. The last section is intended to clarify the relationship between sovereignty, state power, and capitalism, towards the end of clarifying the ways in which sovereignty is an independent, yet constitutive feature of capitalist relations within nature that is subject to its own contradictions and antagonisms. This provides theoretical grounds for the identification of an emancipatory ecological politics to resolve the climate crisis with movements that are anti-state as well as anti-capitalist.81

81 Originally I had intended to include a section entitled: “Coda: What of Other Green Radicalisms? Marxist Ecology Against New Materialism and Green Keynesianism.” However I have had to cut this for time/space considerations. 109

Chapter 3. Hegemony, Labor, and the Metabolism of Nature: Gramsci and the Ecology of the Political

"Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language." – Raymond Williams82

“Everything that is of real importance in sociology is nothing other than political science.” – Antonio Gramsci83

3.1. Introduction

In the previous chapter, I provided a critical framework for understanding contemporary debates regarding climate change politics, based on how these approaches conceptualize the nature of the problem of climate change, and the necessary political means of addressing it. Drawing upon Bertell Ollman’s conception of moderate, radical, and Marxist approaches to political science, I showed how moderate and radical approaches turn on a binary conception of the political. Whereas moderates tend towards a piecemeal approach while relying upon existing institutions and political relations to implement solutions, radicals rightfully emphasize the interconnected, systemic dimensions of the climate crisis, and prioritize politics of resistance for addressing climate change. However, because both moderates and radicals ultimately fail to

82 From Keywords, pg. 219. 83 From Selections from the Prison Notebooks, pg. 243. 110 adequately identify the roots of the crisis in the ecological and political relations of capitalism, even the radicals end up failing to provide an adequate account of both the origins of the crisis, and thus the necessary means of resolving it politically, and in turn, in many cases end up promoting measures that reinforce and/or ultimately rely upon state power, or are even oriented towards ushering in a new, ‘greener’ form of capital accumulation.

For these reasons, I turned to the framework of Marxist ecology, which I develop out of engagements with Marxist perspectives on capitalism, ecology, and the climate crisis from geography, political ecology, and environmental sociology/ecosocialism.

From these perspectives, I identify at least four implications of Marx’s analysis of capitalism for understanding and conceptualizing environmental political problems, including the planetary ecological crisis of climate change. First, in our capitalist system, humans do not have direct control over the organization of social reproduction in our world-ecology (what may otherwise be understood as the ‘socio-ecological metabolism’ or the ‘metabolic relations between humans and nature’). Instead, the social metabolism of humans and the Earth subject to the capitalist ‘law of value,’ whose prime objective is the endless production and accumulation of capital (value-in-motion), or production and accumulation for their own sake. This structural necessity for the growth imperative, defined by the endless production and accumulation of capital, and its resulting contradictions and antagonisms, are the basis for capitalism’s anti-ecological

(ecologically unsustainable) nature (2): that is, capitalism’s drive towards endless accumulation tends to undermine the very material conditions necessary for its own

111 reproduction. This manifests in the form of social, economic, but above all political- ecological crises, which in capitalism are never fully ‘resolved’ at a structural level, but merely ‘fixed,’ through reconfigurations of space, time, and capital.84 This grounding of the planetary ecological crisis in specific historical, social, and political conditions, as opposed to a more abstract, universal, and/or fixed “human nature,” can therefore be read as a specific mode of “de-naturalizing” the crisis and its politics, even as we recognize that capitalism and its crises are ultimately taking place (with)in nature, and are thus part of nature (3). Thus, without addressing these fundamental structural conditions and relations that organize human relations within nature on the Earth, any ‘solutions’ to the crisis will be ultimately limited in their capacity to resolve the crisis and its contradictions

(4).

This last point, it is worth noting, also applies to the Marxist ecological perspectives discussed in the previous chapter. To the extent that these approaches fail to account not just for the ecological contradictions of capitalism, but also its specifically political form – ie, the capitalist nation-state system – they will tend towards at most mitigating, if not ultimately reproducing, the contradictions at the heart of the crisis. This tendency is particularly apparent in critical theories of capitalism that ultimately fall back upon functionalist accounts of the state, on the one hand, or those which fail to account for the ‘plurality of polities’ in the international system (Neumann 2014).

84 To take just one example as it relates to climate change, for more than 30 years, capital has been displacing the costs of mitigation and adaptation upon future generations, rather than accounting for these social and ecological costs at the points of extraction, production, exchange, and consumption.

112

This tendency is also apparent in radical approaches to the climate justice movement. Consider, for example, in Naomi Klein’s radical approach to climate politics.

Throughout her career, Klein has defined herself as one of the sharpest and most prominent critics of neoliberal globalization and has produced some of the most important movement-based texts of the 21st Century. No Logo (2000), published at the turn of the new millennium, is one of most important documents of the so-called “Alter- globalization” or global justice movement, a global account of the exploitation and consumerism at the heart of the fashion industry and the resistance movements against it

(ranging from anti-sweatshop organizations to anarchist infoshops and zines). And in a similar manner that No Logo has come to be identifiable with the movement it documents, so too has This Changes Everything become a defining text of the movements against climate change and for climate justice. Throughout her work, Klein consistently identifies with popular movements and struggles on the ground, and is effective at counterposing the capacity of communities and activists to organize and struggle for more egalitarian, democratic, and sustainable alternatives than those foisted by politicians and elites. Klein, like many in the global justice and climate justice movements, has a well-earned distrust of authority, which is reflected as much in her omissions as in her scathing critiques of neoliberalism and its politics. From a disciplinary standpoint of political science and global environmental politics, it is notable that for being one of the most important texts on climate politics of the 21st Century, Klein spends remarkably little space discussing or analyzing the international negotiations or institutions: for example, Klein spends roughly <1% of her 460+ page text (not including notes and

113 references) on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

(UNFCCC) and “treaty negotiations.”85

Instead, Klein prefers to go where the action is at: that is, in addition to gaining access and profiling some of those who are most responsible for the crisis – such as fossil fuel-funded climate denialists of the Heartland Institute, whose influence and impacts are felt in the policy stance of the current Trump Administration – Klein goes to frontlines of resistance against the fossil fuel industry, much of which is happening on the “frontlines” of extraction and production. Klein calls this “roving transnational conflict zone that is cropping up with increasing frequency and intensity wherever extractive projects are attempting to dig and drill” Blockadia (2014: 254).

It is clear that for Klein, Blockadia holds the key to the struggle against fossil capitalism and extractivism. She is also careful to note, as she elaborates in her followup

No Is Not Enough, that the participatory, democratic, and self-organized principles that underpin much of the organizational and tactical forms of Blockadia-aligned movements and struggles are coherent with a broader vision and practice of a socialist political project that is necessary for redressing the ills of neoliberal capitalism. However, Klein’s analysis falls short of an ecological Marxist critique insofar as she cautiously indicates support (as a Canadian political observer) for the rising tide of social democratic politics within the US Democratic Party, including recent proposals for a Green New Deal, explicitly modeled on the Keynesian New Deal in the wake of the Great Depression.

85 The index gives 4 pages for the UNFCCC entry, and 5 for “climate treaty negotiations” (each overlapping); no entries exist for “conference,” “Conference of the Parties,” or “COP,” ie the primary decision-making bodies of the international regime (Klein 2014). 114

Upon closer examination, the role of grassroots political movements, even resistance movements like Blockadia, becomes clearer: the goal for radicals like Klein is not revolution or emancipation, and certainly not by seizing and exercising worker and community-led control over the means of production, but rather to apply adequate extra- economic political pressure to weaken or turn back the crony capitalists, while working to reform the state apparatus to mitigate and adapt to a warming world in a more just manner than currently predominates. Klein’s goal is not to overturn capitalism per se, but rather resist and reform its neoliberal variant. These reformist tendencies are evident among other radical ecologists, such as the Extinction Rebellion movement.

To address this gap in the critical literature on climate politics regarding the nature and place of the capitalist state in the climate crisis, in this chapter I build upon the ecological Marxist framework by developing it through an ecological reading of

Gramsci’s theory and framework of hegemony in the Prison Notebooks, including its implication for understanding international politics though its conceptions of hegemony and the (integral) state system. By way of conclusion, I will then highlight another avenue of research that is necessary for a comprehensive Marxist ecological approach to the politics of the capitalist nation-state system, but which I am unable to provide here due to constraints of time and space: development and application of a Marxist ecological critique of the nature of sovereignty, the sine qua non of state authority. These provide the theoretical grounds for the emancipatory ecological critique of the competing hegemonic forms of eco-political praxis in Part II: climate governance and climate justice.

115

3.2. Gramsci, Politics, Science

3.2.1 On Gramsci and Neo-Gramscianism

Antonio Gramsci is without question one of the most significant critical intellectuals of the past 100 years, and is perhaps the most important Marxist political theorist of the 20th

Century. Unlike Lenin and Mao, Gramsci was never a head of state (though he did hold office as a Communist member of the Italian Parliament), but the impact of his political and intellectual labor made its presence both throughout his lifetime and still clearly resonates today. As a founding member of the Italian Communist Party and a key figure in the resistance against fascism, Gramsci was as a key figure in the continental political struggles in the first half of the 20th Century. As a political intellectual, he had already made a name for himself even before his notorious imprisonment in Mussolini’s Italy, where the chief prosecutor famously declared “We must stop this brain from working for twenty years!” (SPN xviii).

Fortunately this was not entirely the case, as what would become known as The

Prison Notebooks would shape political struggles and debates among the radical left for generations to come.86 Debates and party lines among European communists were drawn in no small part with respect to differing interpretations of Gramsci’s thought and legacy for the prospects of proletarian resistance against capitalism and the relationship with bourgeois democracy. With the rise of the “new social movements,” the fall of the Berlin

Wall and the collapse of “state communism,” and a new series of social, political,

86 Gramsci suffered health problems throughout his life, and passed away shortly after being released from prison on medical grounds, just a decade after his imprisonment. 116 economic, and environmental crises of capitalism and the state system at the turn of the new century, Gramsci’s thought continues to be a key source of inspiration and influence for activists and scholars on the left. As Eric Hobsbawm notes in his introduction to The

Antonio Gramsci Reader (1999), reading and understanding Gramsci’s writings on politics cannot be adequately understood without engaging with the social and political context of its production, dissemination, interpretation, and implementation.

Gramsci’s influence can be felt not just across the more traditional domains where

Marxist theory can be expected to found, such as political science and international relations theory, sociology, and critical political economy, but in fields as diverse and wide-ranging as human geography, cultural studies, area studies, and linguistics. He has also been credited as a key figure in the development of Marxist and post-Marxist sub- fields and approaches such as post-colonial and subaltern studies, post-structuralism, and radical democratic theory. Within the fields of political science and international relations

(IR), Gramsci’s thought is most commonly associated with the “Neo-Gramscian” school of IR, a critical theoretical alternative that emerged amid the so-called “paradigm wars” and has since produced a significant, if relatively marginalized (and under-estimated), research program over the past 30+ years (Cox 1983, 1986; Cox and Sinclair 1996;

Rupert 2003, 2005; Bieler and Morton, eds. 2006; Ayers, ed. 2008; Stephen 2011; Budd

2013; Ives and Short 2013).

It is thus ironic that it is precisely within the fields within which Gramsci can be seen to have his most direct influence and relevance – political science, political theory, and international relations theory – that Gramsci’s greatest contributions have yet to be

117 fully recognized and appreciated as a distinct approach towards a scientific understanding of politics. Political science has yet to fully confront Gramsci’s conception of political science as one grounded in a historical and materialist but above all practical approach to politics. This is of course not to say that political scientists, political theorists, and IR scholars have not made productive use of Gramsci’s concepts and general framework towards the study of political phenomena. Rather it is, first, to acknowledge the extent to which political scientists, political theorists, and IR scholars have yet to systematically reflect upon and integrate Gramsci’s notes regarding the nature and practice of politics and their relations with his specific reflections on science, including political science, barring a few admirable, but ultimately flawed, exceptions (e.g. Cox 1983). And second, it is to acknowledge that the extent to which that “Gramscian” scholars participate in the reification of methodological and disciplinary boundaries between “political science” and

“political theory,” the “international” and “domestic” spheres of political relations,

“politics” in distinction from “the economy” or “society,” and other such dichotomies characteristic of the modern social sciences, they too are falling short in their capacity to effectively mediate the dialectical tensions that define the fields which Gramsci sought to analyze.

These tendencies are derived from at least two major factors which have conditioned the reception of Gramsci’s thought to this day within the fields of Anglo-

American political science and IR. First are certain features and historical of the discipline of political science, within which political theory and international relations are generally contained as distinct “sub-fields.” Among these we can consider the hegemony

118 of positivism within political science, including the so-called “Behavioral Revolution” of the early 20th Century, which gave rise to formal separation of political “science” with political “theory.” Whatever their current reception or status within the discipline (which itself fluctuates with historical circumstances), perhaps the greatest legacy of behavioralism (or positivism more generally) can be attributed to the widespread acceptance and/or predominance of a natural scientific model within political science, whereby “science” is conceptualized predominantly as the production of empirically testable hypotheses and reciprocal interactions between hypothesis generation, testing, and measurement. As an intellectual practice and mode of disciplinary organization, this is distinguished from the allegedly non-scientific domain of what has been predominantly normative (and liberal) but also historical, textual, interpretive, and other approaches to political “theory.” What this means in practice is that Gramsci is seen less as a model for the type of political science we should practice, a political science that is predicated upon a fundamental critique of its very object, a political science that critiques itself as an object in itself, but rather more as a producer of concepts, or better yet, hypotheses, whose ideas may be assimilated and tested. Gramsci’s contributions to “political science” in this framework are less about what he can teach us about the practice of integrating theory and praxis, and more about whether or not his conception of hegemony provides a sufficiently rigorous or measurable means of interpreting or explaining politics.

There are also the historical origins of the discipline and its relations with contemporary political power, particularly within the United States: the separation of the distinction between the “international” and “domestic” spheres is not only a defining

119 characteristic of modern states and their operations in capitalism, but these distinctions serve further intellectual-political utility in the modern and contemporary geopolitical contexts. As a discipline, IR can be seen as having come fully into its own during the

Cold War, especially as political scientists and intellectuals sought to understand the strategic relations between the Western capitalist bloc led by the United States and the socialist bloc led by the USSR. Theorizing the “external” relations between the US and its allies of the “first world” with that of the USSR and its allies of the “second world,” not to mention non-aligned (or contested) “third world,” played a crucial role in defining core intellectual/paradigmatic features of the discipline of IR, including anarchy, polarity, even hegemony, as well as fostered key developments such as the production and application of game theory and behavioral theory to political phenomena. At the same time, the field of “comparative politics” and its focus on the “internal” operations of domestic politics within nation-states can also be read as strongly conditioned by the attempts of (largely Western) political scientists to track and better understand the similarities and differences, including competing historical “development” trajectories and tendencies, within and between “West” and “East,” and what would later become

“North” and “South.” As we will see, not only does Gramsci insist that it is essential that we critically reflect upon the effects and implications of these social and historical dynamics in our own conception of the world, at the same time his framework and approach challenges and resists such binary, and bourgeois, modes of thinking.

Besides these features, which are primarily (but not exclusively) characteristic of the discipline of political science, there are also crucial historical-philological factors at

120 play. Many (if not most) who rely upon and integrate Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks into contemporary political science rely heavily (and frequently exclusively) upon the problematic Selections from the Prison Notebooks (hereafter SPN), edited by Quintin

Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (1971). While this volume is noteworthy for having been the first major introduction to Gramsci’s thought in the English-speaking world, it is widely recognized among Gramsci scholars that this volume suffers from a number of notable issues, including problems with translation as well as idiosyncratic methods of organization (for example, several notes are seemingly compiled and organized at random, some with heavy editing/deletions and others stitched together haphazardly, with sometimes little to no acknowledgment by the editors). Few acknowledge that it was not until 1975 that Valentino Garratana’s complete, critical edition of the Quaderni del carcere (hereafter QC) was compiled and published in Italian, and fewer still consult these completed volumes. In fact, the complete prison notebooks are as yet unavailable in

English, which means that some of the most important notebooks on politics and political theory, such as Q11 and Q13, are unavailable to English-only readers except as fragments.87

As we will see, taking a closer and more comprehensive look at Gramsci’s writings on politics and political science provides us important insights into the relations between not just politics and science, but humans and nature as well. Using this

87 When citing the Prison Notebooks, I will follow conventions of Gramsci scholarship which follow those defined by Garratana (1975). This takes the form of a notebook (Q = quaderno) and a paragraph (§) number indicating specific note, followed by a citation of the corresponding English language text (generally SPN or AGR). For more on this, see Forgacs’ “Notes on the Text” in the Introduction to AGR and the Concordance Tables provided by the International Gramsci Society website: http://www.internationalgramscisociety.org/resources/concordance_table/index.html 121 framework of analysis can therefore provide critical insights into the politics of climate justice in an era of ecological crisis. Concepts such as hegemony, historical blocs, and the integral state can provide us important critical analytical leverage into understanding the politics of climate change.

3.2.2. Man and Nature, Conceptions of the World, Philosophy of Praxis

Following Peter Thomas (2009a), the central and fundamental political concepts which structure Gramsci’s approach to politics, and indeed arguably the entire Prison

Notebooks themselves, are “hegemony” and other related concepts including “integral state” and “historic bloc.” However, to develop an adequate conceptualization of these terms and their broader methodological implications, it is important to work through some of Gramsci’s fundamental notes on philosophy regarding the relations between humans and nature, and their relations with Gramsci’s more original conceptualizations of “philosophy of praxis” and “conceptions of the world.” This will enable us to better and more fully grasp the role and place of hegemony and its inter-related concepts within the broader intellectual-political project that Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks represent, such that we may apply them to the study of the politics of the global ecological crisis of climate change and the struggle for climate justice.

‘Conceptions of the world’ is a central ontological and epistemological concept in

Gramsci’s thought, and is fundamental for having an adequate grasp of his

122 conceptualization of hegemony.88 Gramsci’s primary notes on conceptions of the world are found in his reflections on philosophy, predominantly in Notebooks 10 and 11, each of which were written between 1932 and 1935 (AGR 15; Concordance Tables). To understand Gramsci on his fundamental concepts, including conceptions of the world and hegemony, we must first engage with Gramsci’s political ontology, which is also a political anthropology and a political ecology, insofar as these concepts and frameworks are derived from two important notes on the question of the relations between humans and nature.89

The first major note that addresses Gramsci’s approach to understanding human beings and their relations with(in) nature is entitled “What is Man?” (Q10II, §54). 90

Gramsci begins this note by asserting that the question of “what is man” is the primary question that philosophy seeks to answer (SPN 351), which as we will see below, may refer to not just “the specific intellectual activity of a particular category of specialists or of professional and systematic philosophers” but the “’spontaneous philosophy’ which is proper to everybody” (Q11, §12: AGR 324-5, SPN 323). However, what is relevant for

Gramsci are not “what every individual man is,” in and of themselves, but instead the idea of “what man can become” (Q10II, §54: SPN 351). This is the question that bears

88 For more on Gramsci’s reflections on ontology and epistemology, see his critical response to Nicholai Bukharin’s Theory of Historical Materialism and his other notes on Marx and Marx’s critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right 89 For more on Gramsci’s “conceptions of the world,” see Wainwright 2010b. 90 Note the gendered use of language typical of Gramsci and the period (which we will also find in Marx below). I will avoid inserting ‘sic’ after each use of the masculine indeterminate noun while acknowledging that gender-neutral language could make for a worthy substitute in modern translations. 123 the critical answer to the political question of whether man is in fact, and to what extent,

“the maker of his own destiny” (Q10II, §54: SPN 351).

According to Gramsci, the fault of Catholicism (a hegemonic force in Italy at the time), and all hitherto existing philosophies, is that they have conceived of man as a defined and limited individual. As such, it is necessary to redefine the concept of man, not according to these static and bounded conceptions, but instead as a “process, and more exactly, a process of his actions” (Q10II, §54: SPN 351). Conceiving of man in these historical, relational, and practical terms, “as a series of active relationships (a process),” requires taking into account the various elements of which the “humanity which is reflected in each individuality is composed,” which consists of “1. The individual; 2. Other men; 3. The natural world” (Q10II, §54: SPN 352). Gramsci goes on to say that people do not enter into relations with others

by juxtaposition, but organically, in as much, that is, as he belongs to organic entities which range from simplest to most complex. Thus Man does not enter into relations with the natural world just by being himself part of the natural world, but actively, by means of work and technique. Further: these relations are not mechanical… [but] active and conscious… correspond[ing] to the greater or lesser degree of understanding that man has of them. So one could say that each one of us changes himself, modifies himself to the extent that he changes and modifies the complex relations of which he is the hub. In this sense the real philosopher is, and cannot be other than, the politician, the active man who modifies the environment, understanding by environment the ensemble of relations which each of us enters to take part in. If one’s own individuality is the ensemble of these relations, to create one’s personality means to acquire consciousness of them and to modify one’s own personality means to modify the ensemble of these relations. (Q10II, §54: SPN 352) 91

91 Note the complementarity of this note with Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” (see also: Gramsci 1971, footnote 37). 124

As we see in this note, there are important social and ecological dimensions of Gramsci’s ontology and anthropology which resonate with the broader dialectical and historical dimensions that Gramsci’s thought shares with Marx. The first is to note the process- relational conceptualization of “man” or “humanity,” which cannot be reduced to a singular or passive “object” of analysis, merely constituted by the web of social, natural, and historical relations, but a diversified and active “subject” which is co-constitutive of the social and natural world in which we find ourselves.92 Moreover, just as man himself is at any given moment not simply a fixed or static being, nor are the social and environmental relations by which he is composed, which are historical and dynamic as well. Thus humanity is not simply the synthesis of social and environmental relations at any given moment, but the synthesis of the history of that entire ensemble of relations.

This is of course not a radical idealism or social constructivism, nor does it reduce human subjectivity to just another “agentic” process or relation in an otherwise “vibrant”

(but a-subjective or a-historical) materiality (cf. Bennett 2009). Instead, we see a dialectical relationship between humans, who themselves are defined by their unique capabilities (expressed to varying degrees) for reflective self-awareness and conscious self-organization, qua “philosophy,” with the natural world, or what Jason Moore calls

“the rest of nature” (2015). It is important to note the extent to which this conceptualization tracks Marx’s own ecological mode of analysis, his distinct manner of understanding and analyzing humans and nature in dialectical relation with one another.

92 David Harvey makes a similar point in his interpretation of Marx’s Capital when he claims that Marx defines capital not as a “thing” but a “process” (ie value-in-motion). 125

Compare Gramsci’s claims that “Man does not enter into relations with the natural world just by being himself part of the natural world, but actively, by means of work and technique” and “that each one of each one of us changes himself, modifies himself to the extent that he changes and modifies the complex relations of which he is the hub” (Q10II,

§54: SPN 352), with Marx’s definition, in Chapter 7 of Capital Vol. 1, of labor as

[F]irst of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates, and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body… in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature. (Marx 1976[1863]: 283)

Here, we can see how both Marx and Gramsci share distinct insights into an understanding of the dynamic and historical dialectic of humanity’s relations with the rest of nature. Human beings are a part of nature, and yet, at the same time, we share a distinct capability for organizing ourselves and our relations with(in) nature. As we will see, conceptions of the world and hegemony play a critical role in humanity’s distinctly political capabilities of organizing and (re)producing those social and environmental relations. My point here is to underline the fact that this emphasis on social and environmental relations, between humans and the rest of the natural world, demonstrates a distinctly ecological mode of thinking that is central to both Marx and Gramsci’s thought, and is critical for understanding how politics mediates these relations.

The second major note on Gramsci’s political ontology which makes important contributions to the development of the concept of ‘conceptions of the world’ is entitled

126

“Some Preliminary Reference Points [for the Study of Philosophy]” (Q11, §12). This note begins with the primary onto-anthropological thesis, that “all men are philosophers.”

All people are philosophers insofar as we contribute to, and reproduce, the ‘spontaneous philosophy’ that is “proper to everybody” and

is contained in: 1. language itself, which is a totality of determined notions and concepts… 2. ‘common sense’ and ‘good sense’, 3. popular religion, and therefore, also in the entire system of beliefs, superstitutions, opinions, ways of seeing things and of acting, which are collectively bundled together under the name of ‘folklore’. (Q11, §12: AGR 325)

Gramsci goes on to note that “even in the slightest manifestation of any intellectual activity whatever, in ‘language’, there is contained a specific conception of the world”

(Q11, §12: AGR 325, italics added). He then poses a question that gets at the gist of his onto-epistemological understanding our relations with the world and the heart of his critical intellectual-political project:

[I]s it better to ‘think’, without having a critical awareness, in a disjointed and episodic way, to take part in a conception of the world mechanically imposed by the external environment, ie by one of the many social groups in which everyone is automatically involved from entry into the conscious world… or is it better to work out consciously and critically one’s own conception of the world and thus, in connection with the labors of one’s own brain, choose one’s sphere of activity, take an active part in the creation of the history of the world, be one’s own guide, refusing to accept passively and supinely from outside the moulding of one’s own personality? (Q11, §12: AGR 325)

As the Socratic framing of Gramsci’s rhetorical question suggests, he sees this conscious, critical, and social activity as the essential task of philosophy, or more specifically, a

‘philosophy of praxis.’ We should recall that for Gramsci, philosophy is not as strange or difficult as it may otherwise appear at first glance, but is rather, a subset of the broader 127 category of “conceptions of the world.” Thus, in addition to the academic understanding of philosophy as practiced by traditional intellectuals, conceptions of the world also contain the ‘spontaneous philosophy’ we all engage in throughout our everyday lives, particularly through the use of language, our ‘common sense’ and ‘good sense’, and folklore and religion.

In the next paragraph, Gramsci describes the social nature of our conceptions of the world, stating that “[i]n acquiring one’s conception of the world one always belongs to a particular grouping which is that of all the social elements which share the same mode of thinking and acting” (Q11, §12: AGR 325). He goes on to criticize the

“disjointed and episodic” conceptions of the world that are characteristic of those who have not adequately subjected their conceptions of the world to conscious and critical self-reflection, and outlines the tasks of the critical philosopher (qua socially-defined intellectual):

When one’s conception of the world is not critical and coherent but disjointed and episodic, one belongs simultaneously to a multiplicity of mass human groups. The personality is strangely composite: it contains Stone Age elements and principles of a more advanced science, prejudices from all past phases of history at the local level and intuitions of a future philosophy which will be that of a human race united the world over. To criticize one’s own conception of the world means therefore to make it a coherent unity and to raise it to the level achieved by the most advanced thought in the world. It therefore also means criticism of all previous philosophy, in so far as this has left stratified deposits in popular philosophy. The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. Such an inventory must therefore be compiled at the outset. (Q11, §12: AGR 325-6)

128

Conceptions of the world are thus inherently social and historical, and it is possible for any one individual to hold multiple, conflicting conceptions of the world at any given time. As a matter of fact, Gramsci asserts that “Philosophy in general does not in fact in exist,” but rather “[v]arious philosophies or conceptions of the world exist, and one always makes a choice between them” (Q11, §12: AGR 328). How does one make such a choice? “[S]ince all action is political, can one not say that the real philosophy of each man is contained in its entirety in his political action?” (Q11, §12: AGR 328).

“[P]hilosophy cannot be divorced from politics,” according to Gramsci, because it is necessary to unify thought and action; that is, it is necessary to develop and integrate a

“systematic, coherent, and critical” conception of the world that can be expressed in a coherent unity “affirmed in words” and “displayed in effective action” by a social group

(Q11, §12: AGR 328). Thus the “choice and criticism of a conception of the world is also a political matter” (Q11, §12: AGR 328).

Gramsci recognizes this eminently political-intellectual task of the production of a systematic, coherent, and critical conception of the world for a specific social group as a

“philosophy of praxis,” which he finds embodied in the work of Machiavelli and Marx.

For Gramsci, political science and philosophy of praxis are integrally related. What makes a philosophy, let alone a philosophy of praxis, distinct from other conceptions of the world? “Philosophy is criticism and the superseding of religion and ‘common sense’

[and] in this sense coincides with ‘good’ as opposed to ‘common sense’” (Q11, §12:

AGR 327). The social reflexivity of “criticism” is what makes philosophy, as well as science, an “intellectual order.” “To criticize one’s conception of the world,” Gramsci

129 argues, “is to make it a coherent unity and to raise it to the level achieved by the most advanced thought in the world” (Q11, §12: AGR 326). Because religion and common sense lack this critical element, they “cannot constitute an intellectual order, because they cannot be reduced to unity and coherence even within an individual consciousness, let alone collective consciousness” (Q11, §12: AGR 327). These conceptions of the world produce interests that are “limited, more or less corporate or economistic, not universal”

(Q11, §12: AGR 328). Philosophy and science, including the philosophy of praxis and political science, are intellectual orders by virtue of their critical and integral natures, that is to the extent they are self-reflective, coherent, and unified, in contrast to other conceptions of the world which remain deferent to traditional authorities, disjointed, and reactionary.

The task of a philosophy of praxis is to produce a unified and coherent collective conception of the world for the practical and intellectual organization of a social group, towards the realization of their universal interest. In the contemporary context of the historical subordination, exploitation, and oppression inflicted upon working and subaltern classes by dominating classes, this means organizing to overcome the hegemony of capital and the capitalist classes, towards the end of realizing an alternative hegemony. From a Marxist perspective, to the extent that the working classes represent the universal nature of the human as an eminently social and practical being, the realization of this workers’ hegemony would constitute the universal self-realization of humanity as such (what Marx called “human community” or “communism”). Such an alternative hegemony must be predicated upon the abolition of class hierarchies and their

130 resulting contradictions and antagonisms, thus creating the conditions for the realization of what Gramsci called a self-regulated society (Q6, §88: AGR 235, SPN 263; see also

SPN 254 fn59 and Thomas 2009b, 29). The task of a philosophy of praxis is, in other words, to produce a conception of the world adequate to the task of achieving this alternative hegemony predicated upon the emancipation of the working classes and the realization of this human community and self-regulated society. In the next section, we will examine the implications that this has for Gramsci’s conception of political science, including the relations between hegemony and the integral state.

3.2.3. Political Science, Hegemony, and the Integral State

Despite the primacy of place that Gramsci assigns to political science in his philosophy of praxis, it is remarkable that relatively few political scientists have reflected upon Gramsci’s notes on political science and considered the implications that this has for the practice and organization of political science. It is important to note that Gramsci considers political science as an integral component of his philosophy of praxis, alongside and dialectically related to philosophy, history, and economics. In a note entitled “The Constituent Parts of a Philosophy of Praxis” (Q10II, §41i), Gramsci details the interconnected nature of a philosophy of praxis and provides an outline for how such a philosophy of praxis should be composed. “A systematic treatment of the philosophy of praxis,” Gramsci writes,

should deal with all the general philosophical part, and then should develop in a coherent fashion all the general concepts of a methodology of history and politics and, in addition, of art, economics, and ethics, finding place in the overall construction for a theory of the natural sciences. (SPN 431) 131

For Gramsci, the study of political science is integrally connected to the study of history and society, and that as an integral component of a philosophy of praxis, political science requires an adequately historicist perspective. That is, political science must historicize itself and subject itself as an object of critical inquiry. Responding to the rhetorical question of “whether the philosophy of praxis is not precisely and specifically a theory of history,” Gramsci replies that “this is indeed true but that one cannot separate politics and economics from history, even the specialized aspects of political science and art and of economic science and policy” (SPN 431). Gramsci then provides more guidelines for producing a popular manual that can make the general principles of Marxism or the philosophy of praxis more accessible to the masses. These guidelines provide important methodological insights into Gramsci’s thought. Such a manual should first deal “with the philosophy of praxis proper – the science of dialectics or theory of knowledge, within which the general concepts of history, politics, and economics are interwoven in an organic unity,” after which “it would be useful… to give a general outline of each moment or constituent part, even to the extent of treating them as independent and distinct sciences” (SPN 432). Note how Gramsci’s use of the phrase “even to the extent of treating them as independent and distinct sciences” functions as an exception to prove the rule of the integral, dialectical, and relational nature of history, politics, and economics. To use language that we will later see is characteristic of Gramsci’s conception of the relations between “state” and “civil society,” such distinctions – between politics, economics, and history as well as other traditional binaries that structure

132 bourgeois thinking, including between the “public” and “private” spheres, “international” and “domestic” politics, and even “nature” and “society” – are not “organic” as much as

“methodological.” By this Gramsci means that although it may be necessary to analytically distinguish these various levels or moments from one another, they must also be understood as fundamentally intertwined in practice and in being (AGR 224).

Central to Gramsci's philosophy of praxis and his political science are two fundamental concepts: hegemony and the integral state. Peter Thomas (2009b) argues that Gramsci's central contribution in the Prison Notebooks is the

attempt to rethink the concept of the political in both non-metaphysical and concrete terms by means of a theory of hegemony... [H]e attempts to provide an analysis of the 'production' or, more exactly, 'the 'constitution of the political' … as a distinct social relation within … the bourgeois 'integral state'. 'Hegemony' describes the process of this constitution, or the way in which historically identifiable political practices – the social relations of communication, coordination and organization of the project of a particular class or social group – have come to define the nature of 'politics' as such... [T]his analysis forms the foundation for an attempt to think the possibility of a notion of a political 'of a completely different type'... a notion and practice of 'the political' that would be adequate to the formation of what Gramsci calls a 'self-regulated society'. (28-29)

According to Thomas, contrary to most readings, including the "not so well disguised

'Platonizing' theories such as Schmitt's and its latter-day derivatives" in agonistic radical democratic theory, "Gramsci does not provide a theory of 'the political' as such, even less than he provides a 'general theory of politics'" (Thomas 2009b, 28-29). Rather, the task is to provide an adequately political scientific analysis of a given world-historical (or world- ecological) conjuncture, to not only grasp the conditions of its being, and the socio- ecological relations, contradictions and antagonisms that 'structure' it, in order to change

133 it politically. Or, in Gramsci's own words, "[e]verything that is of real importance in sociology is nothing other than political science" (Q15 §10: SPN 243).

Just as is the case for his writings on political science in general, Gramsci’s notes on hegemony and the integral state must be understood as developed over time and in relation across his other writings on politics and history, including his reflections on matters of immediate and relevant interest to Gramsci, such as the struggles against fascism and regarding the interpretation and dissemination of Marxist thought. Three thematics are of particular interest for us. First are his reflections on the history of Italy, including the Risorgimiento and the social and political dynamics between the Catholic

Church, the relations of the industrial proletariat of the more ‘developed’ Northern Italy and the peasants of the more ‘backwards’ South, and the rise of fascism and the elements of its reactionary cross-class collusion. Second are his writings on contemporary political dynamics, including the struggles against fascism and the prospects of socialist revolution in the “West” (Italy, Germany, and the United States in particular) in relation to the

“East” (USSR). Third, and related to the previous two, are his reflections on Machiavelli and Marx and their relevance to historical interpretation and contemporary political science.

As we will see with respect to hegemony and the integral state, or for that matter

“politics” or “the political,” there is no single place we can look for an integral or complete “definition” of a concept in Gramsci’s notes. However, Gramsci does often give us elements of definitions of these concepts, often as starting points for their continued use in political analysis or to elaborate on other subjects, as in the case of the prior notes

134 on philosophy. Accordingly, we might begin our discussion on Gramsci’s notes on political science, hegemony, and state by looking at a note entitled “Sociology and

Political Science” (Q15, §10), where Gramsci identifies political science as “science of the State” (SPN 244). However, to fully appreciate what he means by this, it is important to take this passage in greater context, which will help us better understand the “state” in its “integral” conception, which has important implications for its modes of being and becoming, including its very conditions of possibility, qua “hegemony.”

Gramsci begins this note with a passage that should sound intriguing to contemporary social and political scientists:

The rise of sociology is related to the decline of the concept of political science and the art of politics which took place in the nineteenth century (to be more accurate, in the second half of that century, with the success of evolutionary and positivist theories)” (SPN 243).

In the next sentence, Gramsci provides us the line which graces the epigraph of this chapter, “Everything that is of real importance to sociology is nothing other than political science” (SPN 243). Gramsci goes on to elaborate how this perceived decline of “the concept of political science and the art of politics” relates to the rise of sociology, and how this relates to his integral conception of the state:

“Politics” became synonymous with parliamentary politics or the politics of personal cliques. Conviction that the constitutions and parliaments had initiated an epoch of “natural” “evolution”, that society had discovered its definitive, because rational, foundations, etc. And, lo and behold, society can now be studied with the methods of the natural sciences! Impoverishment of the concept of the State which ensued from such views. If political science means science of the State, and the State is the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the rule class not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules, the it is obvious that all the 135

essential questions of sociology are nothing other than the questions of political science. (SPN 243-4)

From the proceeding passages, we can identify several important characteristics of

Gramsci’s conceptions of political science and the state. First, Gramsci situates political science historically and socially (indeed, politically) in relation to the intellectual currents in which it is intertwined, specifically the historical separation, or “regionalization”

(Wainwright and Mann 2015), of state and civil society in capitalism. This historical and formal separation of “state” and “society” gave rise not only to “political science” and

“sociology” as distinct fields of inquiry, with their own respective subjects and objects, but also relates to the rise of “positivism” and other “methods of the natural sciences,” from which “[i]mpoverishment of the concept of the State” ensued. Hence, historical, social, methodological, disciplinary, and ultimately political dimensions of the dynamics of political science as science of the state must ultimately be analyzed dialectically and relationally.93

Secondly, and perhaps most importantly for our purposes, Gramsci gives us a glimpse at his conception of what he elsewhere calls the “integral state.” This is the concept of the state which appears in other notes as the dialectical unity between “the two

93 A similar point is made in a note entitled “Philosophy-Politics-Economics” (Q10II, §41i: SPN 403-404). In this note, Gramsci states that all three of the preceding elements are “necessary constituent elements of the same conception of the world [philosophy of praxis],” as “[a]ny one is implicit in the others, and the three together form a homogenous circle” (SPN 403). He also emphasizes the historical, political, and ideological dimensions of struggles for hegemony, and their relationships with politics, the State, and political science: To the economico-corporate phase, to the phase of struggle for hegemony in civil society, and to the phase of State power there correspond specific intellectual activities which cannot be arbitrarily improvised or anticipated. In the phase of struggle for hegemony it is the science of politics which is developed; in the State phase all the superstructures must be developed, if one is not to risk the dissolution of the State. (SPN 404) 136 forms in which the State presents itself in the language and culture of specific epochs, ie as civil society and political society” (Q8, §179: SPN 268), or as in other commonly cited formulations, “State = political society + civil society, in other words hegemony protected by the armor of coercion” (Q8, §185: SPN 263), or “dictatorship + hegemony”

(Q6, §117: SPN 239). Thus, Gramsci’s conception of political science not only implies an integral conception of the state, but a relationship between politics, science, the state, and hegemony as well. In defining political science as “the science of the State,” Gramsci means this in a dialectical sense: a science of and about the State, as a social and historical object, in and through an analysis of the diverse and dynamic material configurations that come to constitute the state over time and space, as the “material form of the political under capitalism” (see e.g. Gerstenberger 2011), on the one hand; and on the other, a science for the state and state power, as a political subject, as strategic analysis of the social and historical terrain on which class struggles take place. In other words, for Gramsci political science is not reducible to a scientific analysis of state institutions, or even the ways politics expresses itself in and through the state, nor is it reducible to “statecraft” (as in governance or policy-based approaches) from a position of controlling and managing state power. Rather, political science necessarily entails all of these, but perhaps most importantly also includes rigorous social and historical analysis of the state’s modes of being and becoming, including the very conditions of its possibility, and possibility of its own ‘resolution’ or ‘transcendence’ as a mode of political organization. Political science needs not only an integral conception of the state, but of hegemony as well.

137

Before we proceed to further analysis of Gramsci’s conception of hegemony, it is worth highlighting a few additional points about Gramsci’s conception of the (integral) state. First, it is mistaken to assume that, despite the best efforts of Neo-Gramscians,

Gramsci actually had little of direct relevance to say with respect to “international relations” because he only explicitly referred to such relations and politics on only a

(relatively) few occasions through the Prison Notebooks, as some IR scholars are inclined to do (Femia 2005; Davenport 2013). Rather, as Peter Ives and Nicola Short (2013) point out, Gramsci emphasizes the historical and political contingency of such distinctions between ‘international’ and ‘domestic’ politics. As his notes on the politics of ‘East’ and

‘West’ attest, Gramsci was attentive to the comparative dynamics at play; and yet, at the same time, he would resist the idea that such struggles could be understood in isolation or abstraction from one another (ie whether by “bracketing” [Wendt 1999] or some other means), let alone be reduced to one another (as Gramsci argued Luxemburg and

Trotsky’s analyses were susceptible to).

At the same time, Gramsci’s notes on Machiavelli and Italian unification further suggest the historical and political contingencies that such distinctions between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ political relations and projects of statecraft entail. Here, Gramsci notes that for Machiavelli and Marx, as well as others including the Jacobins and Garibaldi, the

Italian leader of the Risorgimiento, the production and expansion of an internally- coherent and unified national-state was itself an ongoing, and highly politically contested, process with distinct spatial and temporal scales, including shifting configurations of

“internal” and “external” dimensions. Thus, to reify such distinctions, between “internal”

138 and “external” relations, or “domestic” and “international” politics, is not merely to be complicit in the ongoing (re)production of the state form (see Walker 1993), but it entails real political risks in misunderstanding the strategic field at play. It is much better to understand politics, or political relations, as expressed in hegemony and the (integral) state, as overlapping and across scale, and with multiple nodal points relevant for multiple domains (economy, ideology, culture, etc.). Accordingly, Gramsci avoids

Foucault’s criticism of Marxist (structuralist) theories of the state in (Foucault

2003[1976]: 13-14).

While it is well known among IR scholars that Gramsci's concept of hegemony expresses a dual relationship of coercion and consent, as indicated in the frequent references to Gramsci's note on Machiavelli's centaur, or a more general conception of

"political leadership" by a given constellation of class forces in society (Cite Neo-

Gramscian IR), less attention has been paid to the idea of hegemony as expressive of the production or constitution of the political, that is, the material 'grounds' on which

'politics' takes place or strategic-relational field the integral state 'condensates' as the political matter of force relations (Poulantzas 2014[1978], 2008; Jessop 2016).

Wainwright and Mann, who mark a notable exception to this tendency in the literature, draw upon Poulantzas's reflections on hegemony and its relation to the capitalist state to note that "the political refers neither to a particular political condition or set of institutions… nor to the existential fact of struggle (although this is always implicated) but to the very grounds on which such conditions, institutions, or struggles arise and are formulated" (2015, 315). For them, the specifically political character of the capitalist

139 state is constituted by the 'regionalization' of 'state' and 'civil society' (Wainwright and

Mann 2015, 315-16; Poulantzas 2008[1965], 83).

Here is where it is important to recall Gramsci's notes regarding the "political" state as a "moment" within the integral state, as a complex of "political society" and

"civil society." Within a given hegemonic political relation, coercion and consent exist as a dialectical unity, but with an "uneven" relation to one another. The hegemonic

"consent" produced by the (integral) state is always backed by or underpinned by a capacity for "coercive" authority. Importantly, this need not be produced solely by the

"formal" institutional structures of the integral state, ie the "public" institutions that comprise the "government" of the (capitalist) state or "political society," but it also accords a fundamentally political role to the practices and strategies of "non-state" actors and institutions in the "private sphere" or "civil society." In its integral form therefore, the state can thus be conceived as not only a political actor in its own right, that is, as a political "agent" that "does things" (cf. Bennett 2010) in or within its relations with other political actors (including other states and non-state actors), but it also constitutes the very institutional-relational field which "structures" politics.

In the Marxist tradition, these are understood as fundamentally material relations: my contribution, drawing from the Marxist ecological framework from the previous section, is to emphasize the specifically ecological nature of hegemony and the integral state, as constitutive of human and extra-human relations within their material environments under capitalism – that is, within what Jason Moore calls the “web of life,” or under conditions of the planetary ecological crisis of climate change we might

140 consider the Earth or Earth system as a whole, or what we might consider more generally, the whole of nature itself. As a system of organizing social (re)production, the capitalist state gives material expression to the hegemony of capital and its relations with(in) the world – that is, under conditions of capitalist hegemony, the state and capital are the primary means of organizing social reproduction within nature. In the context of the

Marxist ecological tradition, this means that capital and the state represent specific means of organizing the metabolism of nature. Critically exploring this relationship between hegemony and the metabolism of nature is necessary for comprehending not only the

(crisis-ridden) organization of social reproduction under capitalism, but for envisioning, and potentially realizing, emancipatory, socially just, and ecologically sustainable alternatives politically.

3.3 Hegemony and the Metabolism of Nature

Before proceeding to our discussion and analysis of the relationship between hegemony and the metabolism of nature, it is first worth returning to our conception of

Marxist ecology, and the perspective it provides on understanding capitalism as an open- ended, dialectical system of organizing human relations within nature. Ecology, in the broadest sense, refers to the totality of relations between organisms and their environments.94 What the Marxist perspective provides is the necessarily critical and

94 An ‘ecological’ approach therefore can thus be considered distinct from an ‘environmental’ approach insofar as it focuses on the relations of the whole: whereas the concept of ‘environment’ focuses on the one-dimension of the external, material world, an ‘ecology’ is a necessarily systematic relationship and process. The concept of environment suggests a backdrop, a stage, or background conditions upon which living things (including humans) engage in their otherwise “social” or “political” activities. On the other hand, with ecologies there are much more active and dynamic relations among the living and inert matter. 141 reflexive method of approach to these relations as they apply to “us,” that is, concerning the system of relations between humans and our relations with what Moore calls “the rest of nature,” or the web of life. This system, otherwise known as a historical or social formation, can be understood as the capitalist world-ecology or simply capitalism.

Capitalism, however, does not exhaust the totality of the world, nor our history within it: indeed, just as there is a pre-history “before” capitalism (and there will also be, presumably, history after the end of capitalism), there are still spaces and places within nature that are yet to be subject to the law of value. Rather, capitalism is hegemonic – it is the dominant mode of organizing human relations within nature, as it organizes the production of coercion and consent and the prevailing conceptions of the world. And by the same token, capitalism, like all hegemonies, is the subject to its forms of resistance and counter-movements, what Arrighi et al (1989) call antisystemic movements. The analysis of the political forms of capitalist hegemony and its counter-movement with respect to the climate crisis – the dialectic of climate governance and climate justice – is the subject of the next two chapters. Here, I wish to further explore the relations between nature and hegemony from a Marxist ecological perspective in order to elucidate the

“nature” of political relations under capitalism. As we will see, these relations are defined by three structural features: alienation, exploitation, and domination. By way of conclusion, I also with to suggest that these are also constitutive of the (eco-)political relation of sovereignty, which suggests a further line of research for Marxist ecology.

“Nature,” Raymond Williams writes, “is perhaps the most complex word in the

[English] language” (1983: 219). This is because “nature” can be used to refer to at least

142 three “areas of meaning,” each of which, while generally clear in context, may involve

“precise meanings [which] are variable and are at times opposed”: “(i) the essential quality and character of something; (ii) the inherent force which directs either the world or human beings or both; (iii) the material world itself, taken as including or not including human beings” (ibid). Thus, what is “natural” can refer to that which is necessary or essential about a thing (that which makes it what it is and not something else), an “inherent force” or set of guiding principles that organizes the world and everything within it (as referred to in the “natural order” or “laws of nature”), or “the material world itself,” which in this last meaning, can be taken to mean the “natural world” apart from humans, or the entirety of the world (including humans). As

Wainwright notes, “An affiliation between essence, direction, and environment is thus woven through our language” (2008: 5).

The complexity of a concept as dense and contextually rich as “nature” reflects not merely the accumulation of historical knowledge, including various and sometimes competing “conceptions of the world,” but it also reflects something natural about the society itself. This becomes clearer when we consider the concept of “human nature,” which, Williams notes, “is often crucial in important kinds of argument” and which can refer to “any of the three main senses” (1963: 220). On the one hand, “human nature” can be used in a “relatively neutral” sense in which it is used to refer to that which is “an essential quality or characteristic of human beings” (although that thing may not be universally agreed upon). On the other hand, this “descriptive (and hence verifiable or falsifiable)” usage of the concept is often overshadowed by “the very different kind of

143 statement which depends on sense (ii), the directing inherent force, or one of the variants of sense (iii), a fixed property of the material world, in this case ‘natural man’” (ibid). To speak of human nature, therefore, is not merely to speak about what is, but indeed, more often than not, is also to say what ought or must be. Additionally, when we speak of nature, we are speaking in the singular, whether it be a specific singular (i, e.g. “the nature of something”), or in the latter cases, an abstract singular (ii and iii), in which case

“the nature of all things” becomes capital-N “Nature” (ibid).95

Somewhat ironically then, there is a fundamental dualism or ambivalence then embedded in what is natural to being human: on the one hand, many references to our distinctly “human” nature, refer to our capabilities to distinguish ourselves from nature, in other words, to be more creative, dynamic, and/or capable of achievement or greatness than other, merely “non-human” animals. This is the sense in which we humans are both a part of nature, and yet are somehow able to rise “above” nature.96 This is the sense in which Hannah Arendt distinguishes what is properly “human” about us are our distinct capabilities for “political” activity and organization, above mere subsistence or basic reproduction, common to all “social animals.” This even gives rise to the sense in which we may even be able, or at least attempt, to “dominate” or “control” nature/Nature. This distinctly human tendency towards the “domination of nature,” is, of course, ultimately bound to fail: that is, our human nature is what defines the very limits on our existence

95 Moore (2015) emphasizes the symbolic and material “violence of abstraction” inherent to the production of what he calls “abstract social nature” represented by this capital-N “Nature” and the binaries co- produced with it (Nature/Society, Nature/Culture, Nature/Civilization, etc.) (see also Sayer 1987). 96 This is the sense in which Hannah Arendt (1958) distinguishes what is properly “human” about us are our distinct capabilities for “political” activity and organization, above mere subsistence or basic reproduction, common to all “social animals.” 144 and our capabilities, both as individuals and as a species. That all attempts by humans to dominate nature inevitably end up reflecting the folly of man and/or nature’s dominion over man. This utterly futile nature of human nature reflects the fundamental tension or ambivalence of the concept: that to speak of human nature is also as often to “reduce” our status or capabilities to that which, in the long run, ends up with our own undoing.

Wainwright quotes Williams at length, who notes that

What can be seen as an uncertainty was also a tension; nature as at once innocent, unproven, unsure, unprovided, sure, unsure, fruitful, destructive, a pure force and tainted and cursed. The real complexity of natural processes had been rendered by a complexity within the single term… The emphasis on discoverable laws… led to a common identification of Natural with Reason: the object of observation with the mode of observation… Each of these conceptions of Nature was essentially static: a set of laws – the constitution of the world, or an inherent, universal, primary but also recurrent force… teaching a singular goodness (Williams 1963: 222-3; qtd by Wainwright 2008: 5-6)

Here we can see that the tensions and contradictions in our conception(s) of nature are themselves bound up in the historical processes that together have been co-produced.

That is, the development of the conception of nature has taken place alongside the historical developments of human relations within nature. This has been both a material and symbolic process of co-constitution through time and space; in other words, a dialectic.97

97 As Williams notes, “Any full history of the uses of nature would be a history of a large part of human thought” (1983: 221). That said, it is worth recognizing a few key features of this historical trajectory. First, the conceptions of nature as essence and nature as a force of growth/development can be seen as conjoined from the very beginning of recorded history, as reflected in the works of Aristotle. The third meaning, nature as external, material world at the time could be seen as something of a given: it was taken for granted that humans were a part of it. In the Politics, Aristotle famously remarks that “man is by nature a political animal” (ho anthropos phusei politikon zoon): that is, humans are already a part of nature, insofar as it is a feature of our existence that we come together to live and cooperate in units that are more than for 145

Marx, of course, was neither immune, nor unaware of these historical dynamics at play in the conception of nature. For example, in a line that could be read as one of the first formulations of what would later become the Anthropocene thesis, Marx notes that

“the nature that preceded human history… no longer exists anywhere (except perhaps on a few Australian coral islands of recent origin)” (2000[1845]). Here, Marx is criticizing the idealized and romanticized conception of nature found in Feuerbach’s (and other

German idealists’) thought, which was a prevailing conception at the time.

As Saito (2017) reminds us, Marx’s ecological consciousness developed in the history of his own intellectual development through his analysis and critique of capitalism. For the Marx who wrote Capital, the primary unit of analysis is not “nature” per se, but rather the capitalist social formation. While a systematic analysis of Marx’s uses of the concept of nature/natural is far beyond the scope of this project, Capital contains arguably not just the most developed formulation of Marx’s work, but it also provides us perhaps the best starting point for apprehending the dialectical conception of

mere biological reproduction (which Aristotle associates with the household) or natural kinship relations (ie the village), and “the city [polis] belongs to the class of things that exist by nature” (ie it is a fact of the world that cities/polises exist). The polis comes into its own, as an “association of associations,” the end of which is not merely life (biological reproduction), as in the case of bees and other “political animals,” but for the sake of a good life (oriented towards collectively determined objectives). Note that non-human nature is already political, it is just that humans have a qualitatively distinct capacity for (higher forms of) politics, due to our capacities for language and perceptions of “good and evil, of the just and unjust and other similar qualities,” which enable us to become/achieve more than the rest of nature. The idea of humans as wholly separate or apart from nature as a distinctly human essence has a separate history: one that has origins in the Abrahamic religious traditions, in which Man and Nature both originate from God, but are produced separately. This conception of the world would become hegemonic (ie a prevailing conception of the world) with the state-ification of Christianity in the early European world, and the subsequent expansion and consolidation of the early modern European state system and capitalism, through which this Christian ontology would later meld with Cartesian rationalism and the subsequent secularization of Modern thought and sovereignty. This would then underpin the processes of colonization, enslavement, and primitive accumulation that would give rise to the modern capitalist nation-state system and the hegemonic conceptions of politics and nature that define our world today.

146 nature and its relationship with humanity. In Chapter 7, Section 1 of Capital Volume 1, entitled “The Labor Process,” we can identify three dimensions of his use of the concept of nature/natural, which roughly mirror Williams’s three part-definition (though note

Marx distinctly dialectical, rather than binary or oppositional, conception). Here Marx writes,

Labor is, first of all, a material process, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates, and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head, and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he sets upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature (Marx 1976[1876]: 283).

In this passage alone, we can identify multiple uses of nature/natural, and man’s relation to it, as defined by the labor process. First, Marx defines labor as a “material process… between man and nature.” Here we can take Marx to refer to nature in Williams’s third meaning, as “the material world itself,” as the external material world in which humans find ourselves, from which we appropriate and adapt according to our needs, and the world of which we are a part. Marx also makes use of this conception of nature when he refers to “external nature” (ibid). Labor, in this context, is a “process” through which man

“mediates, regulates, and controls the metabolism between himself and nature” (ibid). We also see how humans are a part of nature insofar as, through labor, man “sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body.” And by mediating this metabolic process with nature, man not only changes the “external nature” of the environment, but in so doing “simultaneously changes his own [internal] nature” (ibid). Thus, nature is not

147 only external, but internal to humankind as well. And just as through labor human beings change their external nature, so too does human nature change through the labor process.

Through the regulation and mediation of the “metabolic process” with nature, not only do individual humans reproduce themselves, but society as a whole reproduces itself. In so doing, through labor and societal reproduction, humans produce what in other writings

Marx (following Hegel) calls “second nature.”98 Although Marx doesn’t refer directly to the concept of second nature (only “internal nature”) here in Capital, he does use

“nature” in the sense that “natural” is used to refer to “essence” (ie according to

Williams’s first conception) when, later in the same section, Marx refers to “the nature of the work.”99 Second nature, in other words, is what becomes natural (normal, regular, necessary) to human beings, through historical and social processes, rather than being or remaining “natural” (primary or essential) historically or analytically prior.

As Saito (2017) explains (building off Foster’s [2000] influential analysis), Marx uses the concept of metabolism for comprehending the dynamic relations and processes between humans and nature through the labor process as mediated by capital. Through his detailed historical and textual engagement with Marx’s oeuvre, including editing

Marx’s notebooks on natural history (a volume of notebooks that comprised roughly half of his post-Capital writings), Saito shows how Marx drew upon the then-emerging natural scientific fields of physiology and organic chemistry (and what Ernest Haeckel would later call “oecology”) to develop his conception of the “metabolism”

98 See Smith’s (1990[1984) discussion on Marx (and Hegel’s) conception and discussion of second nature (including his discussion of the influential interpretation by Schmidt [2014(1962)]). 99 Marx (1976: 284): “The less he is attracted by the nature of the work… and the less, therefore, he enjoys it.” The use of “nature” here can be read as that of “essence.” 148

(Stoffwechsel) between humans and the rest of nature. At its most basic meaning,

Stoffwechsel or metabolism literally means “exchange of matter” or “material exchange.”

For the “father of organic chemistry,” Justus von Liebig, whose writings on metabolism made a substantial impact on Marx, metabolism was depicted as “an incessant process of organic exchange of old and new compounds through combinations, assimilations, and excretions so that every organic action can continue” (Saito 2017: 69). This process is elementary to basic biological reproduction, as living organisms must constantly consume nutrients, and excrete the waste byproduct, which is then returned to the Earth such that the cycle continues.100 Or to take a more relevant, climate-related example, consider the carbon cycle and its fundamental relation to the Earth system and the life within it: as living organisms we participate in the Earth’s carbon cycle, as through respiration we exchange carbon (a byproduct of our organic, biological processes) with plants for oxygen (a byproduct of their organic, biological processes of photosynthesis).

The concept of metabolism can also be used to refer to organic processes in non-living matter (oxidation, decomposition), and has since expanded far beyond the domain of organic bodies and to “various interactions in one or multiple ecosystems, even on a global scale, whether 'industrial metabolism' or 'social metabolism'" (Saito 2017: 70).101

100 Radkau (2008) discusses the reuse of human waste as fertilizer (“night soil”) as an ecological practice in certain agricultural societies. 101 Note that while Saito’s (2017) close textual analysis and discussion illuminates how the emergent scientific discourse on the physiological/ecological concept of metabolism contributed to the development of Marx’s own thought (including Marx’s own distinct use of the concept) closely mirrors that of Foster (2000) and is clearly indebted to Foster’s prior work, by my reading Saito is much more careful in his reconstruction of Marx’s ecology while resisting Foster’s tendency to read his own theory of metabolic rift “into” Marx’s text. 149

As early as 1851, literally just months before Liebig’s seminal text on organic metabolic processes was published, Marx was already considering how capitalist societies were qualitatively different from non-capitalist societies on account of how they organized “metabolic interaction” (Saito 2017: 71). Thus, in his pre-Capital writings,

Marx was using “metabolism” as a means of considering the ways in which all societies must organize relations of production and exchange with nature. According to Saito, in the Grundrisse102 Marx’s use of the concept of metabolism becomes “more general and systematic” and more closely linked with the concept of labor. There, Marx discusses the labor process as “metabolic interaction with nature,” or the “material interaction of three moments of production taking place within nature: raw materials, means of production, and human labor" (Saito 2017: 74). “According to Marx, this ‘production process in general’ is ‘common to all social conditions’ as long as humans produce within nature”

(ibid.). There is thus a “transhistorical” dimension to the labor process as a social process of organizing the metabolism within nature insofar as this is a necessary condition for all human societies in time and space.

But there is also another transhistorical dimension to metabolism, insofar as Marx in the Grundrisse also refers to the “metabolism of nature,” which is a process that is independent (and prior) to humans. The metabolism of nature may be considered in a variety of processes across scale, ranging from simple decomposition or oxidation to the patterns tracked in the Earth system by geologists and paleoclimatologists. These

102 The Grundrisse (full title: Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie), sometimes translated as the “Fundamentals of the Critique of Political Economy,” but which also translates to “ground plan” or “outline,” was a manuscript that outlined many of the core concepts and key features of the critique of political economy that would later be further developed and published as Capital. 150 processes in a fundamental sense are necessary or prior to the ability of humans to intervene in the metabolic interactions with nature via labor. Labor, in other words, cannot produce nature alone; rather, it transforms already existing nature (matter) into new and different natures, forms, and materials, for a variety of purposes and intentions.

As Marx put it later in the Critique of the Gotha Programme,

Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use-values (and what else is material wealth?) as labor, which is itself only the expression of natural power, human labor power (Marx 1996[1875]: 208)

As Gramsci later emphasizes, what makes the labor process qualitatively distinct as a mode of the “metabolic interaction with[in] nature” is inherent to the conscious, reflective, self-aware, and creative nature of the human to mediate, regulate, and control,

“through [our] own actions,” this metabolic process. It is through the process of self- organizing our productive relations within nature that we reproduce ourselves as humans.

It is through self-conscious and reflexive practical activity and interaction with(in) nature that labor literally makes us what we are, as through our labor we become human. Thus while other, non-human natures takes part in metabolic processes with other natures (or within nature), only humans engage in the metabolic process of labor.103

103 There is an interesting ecological question to consider with respect to the exclusivity of the status of the human as qualitatively distinct in nature: on the one hand, with greater advancements in our understandings of the social and political natures of non-human animal natures, we can now recognize greater amounts of social and psychological complexity in non-human animals (not to mention the more ‘porous’ boundaries between human and nonhuman described by the new materialists) that could blunt the often sharp distinction Marx and Marxists draw between the human and the non-human. On the other hand, as far as we know, humans are unsurpassed in the degree to which we are not only capable, but which we actually practice higher forms of social organization and complexity, abstract reasoning and systematic rationalization, etc., in large part due to our capacity to manipulate abstract signs via language. The reason why it is worth emphasizing “as far as we know” is precisely because there is no necessary a priori reason that humans are ‘uniquely’ capable (out of the totality of possible life forms in nature or the universe) of 151

However, as discussed above, what makes capitalism qualitatively distinct from all other historical forms of organizing the metabolic relations is the predominance of the law of value: that is, under capitalism, the labor process is subordinated to capital’s drive for unending expansion and accumulation. Value becomes an intermediary for the process of production and exchange within nature, which under capitalist development is the “germ of [the] contradictory relationship [between] nature and society” (Saito 2017:

109):

Capitalist social relations bring new characteristics into the transhistorical metabolic interaction between humans and nature. The allocation of the entire labor and the distribution of the entire product under commodity production are arranged through the mediation of ‘value,’ that is, objectified abstracted labor… Value is the fundamental sign for producers with regard to what they should produce. Since social production is nothing but the regulation of the metabolic interaction between humans and nature, value is now its mediator… Other elements of that metabolic interaction, such as concrete labor and nature, in contrast play only a secondary role and are taken into account only as long as they relate to value, even if they continue to function as essential material factors in the labor process… A germ of a contradictory relationship lies between nature and society with the development of capitalist production. (Saito 2017: 109)

As capital seeks its own endless self-reproduction and accumulation, it encounters material limits, which it then seeks to surpass through more rational mastery of nature.

conscious, reflexive labor mediated by language: if humans evolved from prior, “non-human” forms of life into what we are because of natural processes (relatively) independent of conscious, reflexive, directed activity, then surely could the same happen along other evolutionary pathways. Of course, there could also be sentient life elsewhere in the universe capable of higher (social) forms of reason and conscious, directed practical activity (“labor” or at least a labor-like or equivalent activity). For this reason, following Karatani’s (2003) transcendental critical reading of Marx (and Kant), it is sometimes worth considering the analytical category of “the human” as less of a defined anthropological subject as much as simply referring to “beings like us.” Although this might seem like an abstract philosophical question or debate, it does I suggest have important implications when we consider not only our (political) relations with non-human animals on earth, but is suggestive of what forms of (potential) politics may be possible in the event of contact with extra-terrestrial (sentient) life (cf. Wendt and Duvall 2008). 152

And yet, as capital develops increasingly “elastic” means of surpassing or overcoming these natural limits, it continues to reproduce its own contradictions. Saito calls this the general historical tendency of capitalism:

Capital always tries to overcome its limitations through the development of productive forces, new technologies, and international commerce, but, precisely as a result of such continuous attempts to expand its scale, it reinforces its tendency to exploit natural forces (including human labor power) in search of cheaper raw and auxiliary materials, foods, and energies on a global scale… deepen[ing] its own contradictions (2017: 96)

However, it is also precisely through the systemic socio-ecological crises that emerge as a result of these internally contradictory relations that capitalism is able to restructure itself, often through the intervention of sovereign political authority, the state (see also

O’Connor 1996). On the one hand, this often takes place through the intervention of a sovereign political authority, ie the state, which forcibly compels the reorientation of social production towards politically necessary/determined ends. On the other hand, and not entirely disconnected from the political authority of the state, some capital is able to take advantage of crisis conditions to find innovative ways of exploiting nature The entirety of the social metabolism is greater than what can be captured directly by capital via the value form. Humans, via labor, take part in the broader socio-ecological metabolism, but these processes and relations are not entirely subject to human-directed political control (whether via capital, the state, or the individual worker). Nature is, in other words, inherently (to a determinate degree) “unruly.” Non/extra-human forces and relations play an integral part in the metabolic processes of which labor is a part, and yet these forces and relations cannot be entirely controlled and directed by labor, whether

153 subsumed by capital or not. However, capital can, and does, find increasing innovative ways of exploiting nature. The source of new forms of exploiting nature – that is, new sources of “cheap nature” – is itself a key site for the production of relative surplus value

(Moore 2015).

At this point, it is worth considering Moore’s contribution to concept of value in nature. Like other ecological Marxists (e.g. Foster and Saito), Moore consider labor as part of a broader conceptual category that relates to the metabolic processes of nature.

However, Moore identifies labor in relation to another form of metabolic process in nature, what he calls “work” or what is also sometimes called “work/energy” or the work/energy nexus (a concept Moore [2015: 14] attributes to George Caffentzis). Work can be considered a larger category that includes not only value-producing labor but the

‘unpaid’ human work (such as the labor of reproduction inside the noncommodified, patriarchal household) as well as extra-human work of nature (such as the natural processes behind the transformation of solar energy into organic matter and its spatiotemporal compression into fossilized carbon, ie the “raw materials” which through the labor process become fossil fuels). Work, in other words, refers to not just to the metabolism of humans and nature, but the metabolism of nature itself. Labor, alternatively, can be considered a specifically humanized form of work. The production and accumulation of capital, Moore argues, is predicated upon this exploitation of extra-

154 human work (what Moore calls “appropriation” of nature) just as much as (or even perhaps more than) the exploitation of human labor.104

While Moore’s value theory has come under criticism from more orthodox perspectives on value theory,105 whether or not the Marx of Capital had a conception of value that corresponded with Moore’s precise account matters less than the more general point regarding the appropriation of nature: that the expansion of capitalism is predicated upon the domination of nature, and the production of new (second) natures, which,

Moore emphasizes, is as much a material and economic process as it is political, ideological, symbolic, etc. Capital’s expansion has historically not just been predicated upon, but has necessitated, diverse forms of dominating and exploiting nature. This has been a long and violent process, and it necessarily overlaps with other, non- or extra- capitalist forms of political domination and exploitation, including imperialism, slavery, racism, and sexism. These processes of intervening in and violently re-organizing the reproduction of nature are as much material as they are ideological and symbolic. Above all, they are political.

The most fundamental political aspect of these violent interventions and mediations of humans and nature occur via the process of alienation, which is a necessary pre-condition for the formation of capital(ism). Alienation is the fundamental separation of humans from nature, which, Moore and Saito remind us, is both material and

104 In making this point, Moore underlines the influence of ecofeminists, Marxist feminists and social reproduction theorists who have described the nature of capitalism’s exploitation of unpaid reproductive work in the patriarchal household (e.g. Lisa Vogel, Maria Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, Selma James, Maria Mies). 105 Here I am thinking of some critical commentaries I’ve seen on facebook (among the Value Form group) but I need to do more work to track down sources and (briefly) reconstruct their argument. 155 symbolic. Alienated natures must be produced, materially and symbolically, and this includes the Cartesian dualistic ideology of Nature as abstract, functionally equivalent, and exchangeable. This also includes the production of other humans as “less than human” or “closer to nature,” which in turn legitimizes their enslavement or domination.

But under it all, it is a process that is rooted in historical processes of the physical deprivation and dispossession from workers of direct control over the material means and socially-determined ends of their self-production, as told by Marx in the chapter on primitive accumulation.

What I insist we must do is consider these processes of the alienation, domination, and exploitation of nature as manifestations of the specifically ecological nature of capitalist hegemony. The organization of the metabolic relations between humans and nature is not just a fundamentally political process, but it is the fundamentally political process; it literally constitutes the grounds on which “politics” takes place. The specificity of capitalism’s relationship to nature is the result or manifestation of what I call its “ecological hegemony.” In my own view (one that I believe I share with Moore

[2015]), there is a coherent reading of Marx/Gramsci that sees all “social” and “political” relations as intrinsically ecological, insofar as they take place entirely within natural history. In this way, it makes sense to refer to traditional economic categories like

“finance” as no less ecological than, say, solar radiation management. However, there is some contention as whether this actually aligns with their thought, so it is worth considering the relationship between Gramsci’s thoughts on nature and its relationship to hegemony.

156

Returning us to Gramsci and nature: Benedetto Fontana (2013) provides us perhaps the most comprehensive reading of Gramsci’s writings on nature. Though nature was not arguably as fundamental to Gramsci’s thought as to Marx’s (the concept of metabolism does not a play a central role, for example), Gramsci clearly derives much of his conception of nature from Marx (and Hegel), as well as a philosophical intermediary between Hegel, Marx, and himself in Vico, and, as we saw from the notes on hegemony and conceptions of the world (including the one entitled “What is Man?”), we can derive insights into his politics from his conception of nature (and vice versa).

Fontana identifies five major strands regarding nature and the natural in

Gramsci’s thought: 1.) nature as undifferentiated matter; 2.) nature as second nature; 3.) nature as irrational, as instinct and impulse (which must be transformed and transcended);

4.) nature as chaos or disorder; 5.) the (potential) overcoming of the domination and conquest of nature (Fontana 2013: 124). When referring to nature as undifferentiated matter, Gramsci draws on a tradition of philosophical thought since Kant that rejects the idea of nature-in-itself, or the possibility of knowledge of nature that is objectively independent of subjective human experience, as “basically vestiges of a theological and metaphysical mode of understanding the universe” (Fontana 2013: 125). As Fontana elaborates,

Gramsci recognizes that “matter as such” – the physical properties of matter that constitute matter – is the object of the knowledge generated by the natural sciences. But this does not mean that the object of human knowledge is a nature, or a reality, understood as a thing-in-itself. Nature as such, as an object of pure and abstract knowledge, in Gramsci as in Marx, is not an object of human activity. (ibid)

157

Nature qua nature, according to Gramsci (following Marx and Hegel), is an empty category. In order to acquire meaning relevant for human experience, nature must become history, which for Gramsci is a thoroughly political process (Fontana 2013: 125-

6).

The second conception of nature is the idea of second nature, which Gramsci again derives from Marx and Hegel. The concept of second nature again is intrinsically derived from the role that history plays in shaping both man and nature: specifically, it is through history that man produces his second nature. Fontana notes that “[b]oth Gramsci and Marx... criticize the Cartesian and Enlightenment method of posing the problem [of the relationship between man and nature] as arbitrary, abstract, and ahistorical” (2013:

127). Instead, Gramsci, like Marx, begins with the vantage point of how humanity defines itself in time and space, which necessarily involves a production relationship within nature (ibid). The note that Fontana refers to here is the same starting point for my analysis of hegemony above (“What is Man?”). For Gramsci, the answer to the question of “What is Man?” necessarily involves an analysis of the process of becoming human.

Again, it is worth highlighting that this is an eminently political process: recall that part of the expansion of capitalism via the appropriation of nature involves the categorization of some peoples as less than human and more natural or closer to nature than civilization. This also plays out in many of the most pressing political questions of our day, such as regarding the humanity of refugees in the Mediterranean (reduced, in the words of Agamben [1998], to little more than the status of “bare life”) or fetuses a.k.a. unborn children in the womb. This also clearly plays out with respect to other political

158 questions regarding phenomena like poverty, inequality, and racial/sexual discrimination: how “natural” are these conditions to society? The question of the mediation of nature and humanity is essential to the nature of politics, as it is the ground on which ‘the political’ is determined (Wainwright and Mann 2015).

Humanity is thus both the subject and object of history, which is “the process of the transformation of human beings, both in relation to each other and to nature”

(Fontana 2013: 128). As a process, history is nature becoming “self-determined” – that is, conscious of itself and setting its own ends (limits) rather than merely having them imposed by an external nature (ibid.). According to Fontana’s reading of Gramsci, the process of humanity’s development through history is “continual manufacture of limits within the process of the transformation of nature and society” (ibid). As Moore (2015) also reminds us, these limits are not merely natural but are eminently political, as they are themselves produced in and through class struggle over the metabolic process. And it is an effect of the dominant mode of production, through the exercise of hegemony, that these new relationships within nature (second natures) are produced.

Thus Marx’s concept of praxis (conscious, practical, self-directed activity; for more on praxis, see Chapter 5) is integrally linked to Gramsci’s concept of hegemony

(Fontana 2013: 129). Fontana notes

Most students of Gramsci correctly interpret hegemony to mean the generation and proliferation of a conception of the world throughout society, such that this conception has become the generally accepted practice and way of life of particular social groups. The concept also refers to the struggles – political, ideological, and cultural – of a subordinate group to liberate itself by acquiring consciousness in order to develop a new hegemony and thus become the ruling element of a new sociopolitical order. A subordinate or subaltern group becomes ruling and hegemonic to 159

the extent that it is able to move from the immediate and particular sphere of narrow economic interest to a more universal, more encompassing form of interest which, to Gramsci, can only be political. (2013: 129-130)

The transformation of reality and thought thus go hand in hand. Moreover, conscious, practical activity, whether as praxis or labor, “presupposes a hegemonic form of action”

(Fontana 131). That is, “in the very notion of labor and activity are present the directing and ruling (that is, political) elements of reason and rational knowledge” (ibid). Labor and praxis are fundamentally about the reconciliation of means and ends. The process of production thus

involves the anticipation or prefiguration of the logical and necessary steps required by the rational process... [which] means that the object itself must reveal ahead of time - prior to its physical manufacture - the process necessary to its coming into being. This process, minimally, requires a knowledge of the rational relation of means to ends: to will the end (or the product) is to will the means (or the technique) to the end. One presupposes the other. (Fontana 2013: 131)

For Gramsci, this process requires, besides “the simple application of technique and technology” which happens to involve, Fontana clarifies, “the whole material and social process by which a society creates itself and produces for itself its own complex of physical, economic, and cultural life,” self-subordination as well, “or, which is the same thing, self-commanding and self-discipline” (ibid). This disciplinary relationship extends to nature as well, as humans struggle to rationalize and discipline nature to their will, while nature’s resistance “is a permanent quality of the external world” (132). But it is precisely on the grounds of this dynamic exchange between humans and nature that history (ie politics) is made.

160

Fontana thus argues that “The relation between nature and society is, in Gramsci, one of domination; and it is in the domination of nature that society – and hence humanity – creates itself and develops itself” (133). This domination of nature by man also extends to the domination of man by man. But, drawing upon the influence of

Marx’s reading of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic on Gramsci’s thought, Fontana argues that it is by the same process of domination that the seeds for the realization of freedom are sown:

In the same way, therefore, that consciousness of freedom – and, ultimately, a political order within which freedom is embedded – emerges from the domination of the master over the slave; environmentalism and ecological consciousness emerge from the domination and exploitation of nature. It is through this very domination that the material (technical) and cultural (thought) conditions making possible an ecological and environmentally sensitive relation to nature have arisen. The very technology that in the past was both the instrument and the product of the domination of nature is today the vehicle through which the historical conflict between humanity and nature may be resolved. (Fontana 2013: 138)

Fontana concludes by noting that

it is obvious that Gramsci shows no awareness of what today would be called environmental or ecological concerns. Certainly the aim, purpose, and direction of his thought, insofar as it relates to nature and the physical environment, can be considered an attempt to establish the conditions upon which humanity may erect a new political order based on the rational domination of nature. The very notion of hegemony, in this regard, implies the supremacy of thought and culture over that which is not conscious. At the same time, one cannot fault a thinker for lacking a consciousness whose existence is contingent upon cultural and material factors yet to emerge. (ibid.)

My point is not necessarily to dispute Fontana’s interpretation of hegemony and nature so much as to give grounds for reconsidering hegemony as part of a broader historical 161 dialectic that Marx calls “natural history” (1976[1863]: 92). Based on the foregoing discussion in this chapter, I argue it is possible to conceive of hegemony as the process of organizing the production of human relations within nature. There is nothing in this conception that necessitates “domination” of nature, human or otherwise, per se; rather,

‘domination’ is the form of the political, one that is characteristic of capitalism and sovereignty alike, that must be resisted and overcome in order to realize freedom. Rather than conceiving of hegemony as the “supremacy of thought and culture over that which is not conscious,” I argue that it is coherent and worth considering the concept of hegemony as relatively open with respect to non-rational thoughts, feelings, and values and extra- human experience. At a fundamental level, hegemony means the production of a new common sense, which is coherent with a greater ecological sensitivity or awareness that is not necessarily grounded in a hierarchical conception of nature/society ordering. This can of course include greater awareness/concern for non-human sentient life and material nature. It is also worth highlighting that a critical part of social reproduction, including but not limited to the reproductive labor of care work, relies upon values that defy rationalistic social calculations (in what sense does it make to consider the role that

“love” plays in human social reproduction and care work as “rational”?).

At a minimum, I argue that it is worth considering hegemony as a thoroughly ecological relation, but it may require us to reconsider the concept in relation to

Gramsci’s (and Marx’s) actual writings. For these reasons, I have had to reconsider the framing of my project as a “Gramscian Ecological” project (because of its integration of ecological Marxism with Gramscian hegemony), which I now realize may be less

162 coherent than a “Marxist ecological conception of hegemony.” In any case, an ecological conception of hegemony I argue provides important insights into the nature of politics as a fundamentally ecological relation. Politics, via the exercise/production/struggles of hegemony, are the means by which the metabolic relations between humans and nature are reproduced. Politics is thus always about the organization of relations within nature.106

Furthermore, an ecological conception of hegemony not only provides us necessary insights into the nature of capitalist organization of nature/society relations, but it also enables creative thinking into the (potential) resolution of the planetary ecological crisis of capitalism via political means. For this, I turn to the relationship between labor, direct action, and politics.

106 Thus, we should consider the political as less a region of the social than the social as a region of the political, which are themselves relations in nature. As a historical relation, sovereignty can be read as part of the broader process of human alienation from the rest of nature, and thereby as part of the partitioning of “Society” from “Nature,” not to mention “Politics” from “Society.” 163

3.4. Labor, Direct Action, and the Political Organization of the Metabolic Relations Between Humans and Nature

As we have seen from the foregoing discussion, for Marx and Marxists like

Gramsci, labor is a transhistorical process of regulating the metabolism of nature. Labor is a central concept and means of identifying the relationship between humans and nature in time and space. And in order to under to elucidate the “natural” and “historical” dimensions of human relations within nature and history, Marx relied upon the concept of metabolism or metabolic relations. Metabolism is crucial for illuminating the more general, transhistorical processes of material exchange, growth, development, reproduction, and decay that occur throughout time and space. As a material process of constant dynamism and transformation, metabolism is natural insofar as it is both prior and independent of human relations. As such, this metabolism of nature is a general abstract category that represents the real, material processes that are both prior and external to human relations with the world.

However, historically emergent out of these natural processes, as part of “natural history” (Marx 1976), a certain form of life has become capable of self-consciousness and self-guided action, in and through its material interaction with the rest of its natural environment. Thus, labor is an essential part of the process by which humans become human, in and through our organization of (re)productive relations within nature. Labor thus has natural, historical, and transhistorical dimensions. Labor is natural because it is emergent from within nature, and is a part of natural history itself. Labor is also historical because, by its qualitatively distinct modes of changing nature (ie producing ‘new’ and

‘second natures’), labor dialectically transforms the unfolding of matter in time and 164 space. Labor, from this Marxist standpoint, literally produces human history out of natural history. But labor also has a dimension that is “transhistorical,” from the standpoint of human history at least: insofar as the coordination and organization of the co-productive “social metabolism” between humans and nature is universal and necessary for all forms of human life, labor as an abstract, general category applies across all human societies in time and space.

The Marx of Capital was not primarily interested in the general, abstract category of labor, except insofar as it was necessary in elucidating the qualitatively distinct mode of organizing the social metabolism in capitalism, and thereby providing necessary insights into its contradictory relations, antagonisms, and crises. The ultimate end of

Marx’s project, of course, was not simply scientific, but political: to not just explain the world, but to do so in order to change it. Thus the natural, historical, and transhistorical dimensions of the concepts of metabolism and labor are crucial for understanding not only their prior and contemporary forms in the natural history of capitalism, but for producing knowledge relevant and necessary for real political transformation. Labor and metabolism are thus necessary concepts for the political resolution of the ecological contradictions and crises of capitalism, through the conscious and coordinated reorganization of the social metabolism in an ecologically sustainable form.

However, Marx was unable to complete his project of Capital, and thus it has fallen upon subsequent generations of Marxists to further develop a more complete understanding of how the social metabolism is organized under capitalism as well as what is politically necessary in order to reorganize the metabolic relations ecologically

165 and sustainably. Gramsci’s framework of hegemony is central for producing and understanding of the political relations that organize human relations in nature, such that they can be transformed through concrete, and conscious, political activity (praxis).

Hegemony, like labor, nature, and metabolism, thus has various dimensions of meaning.

On one level, hegemony signifies the ‘leadership’ of particular group in society, and the corresponding, leading conception of the world which, as Fontana reminds us, requires the translation of more narrowly, particularistic interests onto the realm or plane of the universal and transcendent. In capitalist society, this is exemplified in the authoritative role that the bourgeois conception of abstract “freedom” in the realm of the market or electoral democracy has in overriding the concrete domination and exploitation in the actually existing relations of production and exchange. On the other hand, and at the same time, hegemony is the “concrete expression in the world as a way of life and as a sociopolitical order” (Fontana 2013: 138). That is, hegemony is not merely the production and proliferation of a given conception of the world, it is the dialectic of coercion and consent through which a hegemonic historical bloc reproduces their

‘leadership’ status in relation to the whole of society. In other words, coercion and consent, ideological hegemony and political domination, are thus not “qualitatively distinct from one another” but rather “strategically differentiated forms of a unitary political power” (Thomas 2009a, 163).

The material expression of this process of hegemony in capitalist society, or in the words of Nicos Poulantzas, the material condensation of social force relations of class

166 struggle, is what Gramsci calls the “integral state.” Wainwright and Mann (2015: 315-

316) elaborate on the relationship between hegemony, the state, and the political:

[T]he political constitutes an analytically distinct region of the social… the political refers neither to a particular political condition or set of institutions (e.g., liberal democracy or the parliamentary system) nor to the existential fact of struggle (although this is always implicated) but to the very grounds on which such conditions, institutions, or struggles arise and are formulated… it defines a relation tout court; that is, the relationship between the dominant and the dominated. The political is definitely not the arena in which hegemony imposes its interests and the subaltern resists but the grounds on which the relation between the dominant and dominated takes form. (Grounds is thus an apposite term because … implicit in any mode of the political is a spatiotemporal context in which it unfolds and helps shape.)

However, drawing upon the Marxist ecological framework developed in the prior chapter, I would like to clarify a distinct, ecological conceptualization of hegemony, that is not necessarily predicated upon relations of domination per se (as is the case of capitalism’s hegemonic relations within nature). As Wainwright and Mann (2015: 315-

316) note,

In a discussion of hegemony, Poulantzas … emphasizes [that] ‘the state crystallizes the relations of production and class relations. The modern political state does not translate the ‘interests’ of the dominant classes at the political level [as is often suggested in economistic or instrumentalist accounts], but [rather] the relationship between those interests and the interests of the dominated classes—which means that it precisely constitutes the ‘political’ expression of the interests of the dominant classes’ … For Poulantzas, the “specifically political character of the capitalist state” does not lie in the state’s domination by capital but is in fact constituted in the very ‘separation between state and civil society’ ... The legitimacy of this separation is thus both founded on and represents a seemingly natural result of ‘the characteristic of universality assumed by a particular set of values… of formal abstract liberty and equality’

167

The specifically political character of the capitalist state lies in the separation of the economic and political, state and civil society, the relations of domination are transposed from the social/economic sphere and dissolved into the “legitimate authority” of the state’s coercive political apparatuses. Thus, the production of consent is no less an objective of governance than coercion however, as the two go hand in hand.

What is necessary to clarify is the fact that this “formal” separation, and subsequent hierarchization/domination, of the political and economic/social, etc. is the realm of sovereignty. Sovereignty is itself a necessary political form for the reproduction of capital, yet the history of sovereign political authority is not coextensive with the history of capitalist production

If capitalist hegemony is defined by the predominance of the “law of value” as the primary expression or mode of production of relations of consent, the sovereign political authority of the state to coercively intervene in this systemic relations is another dimension of the “unitary political power” of capitalist hegemony. Thus hegemony, the state, and sovereignty are all fundamentally ecological relations, insofar as they play necessary political roles in organizing the metabolic relations between humans and nature in capitalism

More work is needed to specify the precise ecological relations between hegemony, state, capital, and sovereignty across time and space – part of this task is taken up in the next chapters, but there is a lot more ‘historical’ work that is needed for understanding the ecological dimensions of the capitalist state as traceable through premodern and early modern transformations in sovereignty. The relations between state,

168 sovereignty, and capital are reciprocal and dynamic – and yet they represent distinct modes or forms of political relations and processes.

If the Marxist critique of capital is ultimately predicated upon a critique of the material conditions of exploitation, then we might consider a Marxist critique of sovereignty as predicated upon a critique of domination – the distinctly “ecological” dimension of the critique is the critique of alienation from nature inherent to both the capital and sovereignty relations.

What I want to suggest is that if sovereignty is the political form that corresponds with the relation of domination, then an ecological critique of sovereignty must also be against domination: which is something we can observe in Mick Smith’s (2011) radical ecological critique of sovereignty. Thus antisystemic political praxis of nondomination can be conceptualized as a potentially hegemonic mode of (re-)organizing the metabolic relations.

Here I will outline the ecological dimensions of direct action as a form of hegemonic political praxis of nondomination. I will do this through consideration of the concept of direct action in the political theory and praxis of the Industrial Workers of the

World (IWW), specifically a recently republished collection that includes an influential pamphlet by IWW founder William Trautmann entitled “Direct Action and Sabotage”

(2014[1912]) with an introduction by radical historian Salvatore Salerno (2014). Here we can identify elements of a conception of direct action that can ground ecological political praxis that resists the mediation of capital and the state.

169

First, some context. Trautmann was a German immigrant who had years of experience in the labor and socialist movements in Germany and Russia before being expelled under Bismark’s anti-socialist purges. Trautmann was a brewer and eventually settled in Ohio and became active in the Brewery Worker’s Union, where he became a member of the union’s General Executive Board and editor of the German-language newspaper of the rank-and-file workers, Brauer Zeitung (“Brewer’s Journal”) (Salerno

2014: 9). Trautmann would later go on to become a founding member of the IWW, the revolutionary working class union that seeks to unite the workers of the world under “one big union” so that the “the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the

Earth.”107 Salerno writes in his introduction that “Between 1900 and 1905 Trautmann formulated many of the basic ideas which later represented the political and economic philosophy of the IWW" and "is credited with being among the first to introduce

American workers to a version of revolutionary unionism which incorporated aspects of

European syndicalism" (2014: 10). Thus, like Gramsci, Trautmann’s political theory stems directly from his practical political experience organizing workers and observing and engaging in struggles for better material conditions and emancipation. Trautmann, in writing this pamphlet, was also primarily interested in making his work accessible, engaging, and relevant to a working class audience.108 As a syndicalist, whose primary unit of revolutionary political organization and mobilization was the union and whose

107 From the Preamble to the IWW Constitution, accessible here: https://www.iww.org/culture/official/preamble.shtml 108 Recall that prior to his incarceration and the development of his mature political thought via the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci wrote extensively for the socialist journal he edited. 170 primary mode of political action and organization was “economic” struggle at the site of production, in contrast to the traditional Marxist (1st and 2nd International) emphasis on the role of the party and “political” struggle (via the ballot box) that was characteristic of his time, Trautmann can of course be read against Gramsci in the broader context of their respective political orientations. Nevertheless, the conception of direct action that

Trautmann provides us, I argue, can be helpfully considered in the context of Gramsci’s framework of hegemony as part of a comprehensive tactical and strategic vocabulary of eco-political praxis.109

Salerno notes that “the practice of direct action, and of sabotage, are as old as class society itself, and have been an integral part of the everyday work life of wage- earners in all times and places" (2014: 2). In other words, direct action can be read as integrally related to labor as a transhistorical process and category, a point which becomes clearer when we consider how socialists, anarchists, and syndicalists argue that one of the most important features of direct action is the prefigurative role it plays in the production of a future socialist society.110 Salerno observes that “direct action and

109 Praxis, tactics, and strategy can all be considered distinct forms of political activity. Praxis is a general category, and refers to conscious, directed actions towards realizing political ends, objectives, and effects. Tactics and strategy can be considered as moments of praxis, with tactics generally being directed towards shorter term objectives, and usually in service of higher-order (strategic) ends. Strategy usually relates with larger-scale temporal and spatial dynamics and are closer to the order of values and ultimate objectives. That is, while both tactics and strategy can refer to types of political praxis, tactics are usually deployed in terms of achieving broader strategic goals, with strategy being defined by higher-order objectives or goals. The higher-order objectives, goals, and values tend to define the lower-order strategies and tactics (and the corresponding lower-order objectives), yet there is a dialectical and reciprocal nature among them. This is particularly acute among anarchist theories of political action (praxis), which for the most part refuse firm distinctions between political “means” and “ends.” 110 For this reason, anarchist anthropologist David Graeber defines direct action as “acting as if one is already free” (2009: 207). However, Graeber’s anarchist conceptualization of direct action is inherently limited by the objective reality of the unfreedom of capitalism. Arguably, there is a coherent conception of anarchist praxis qua direct action that realizes itself through the nature of its “anti-state” politics. Hence, it makes sense that Graeber is interested in the self-organization of cooperatives and affinity groups in 171 sabotage emerged in opposition to the myriad social injustices of civil society, imperialist conquest, and industrial development” and, as political practices, “range from individual acts of rebellion and resistance or action on the part of small groups, to larger patterns of action within the context of struggle" (e.g. the general strike) (ibid).

Debates over the role and place of direct action as part of the broader set of strategies and tactics were, and continue to be, a central point of contention among the left since the First International. While it is beyond the scope of this project to reconstruct these historical divisions, I agree with Salerno that our contemporary political conditions, including the planetary ecological crisis and the crisis of political imagination for conceptualizing practical political alternatives to it, call for us to re-engage with these questions. And I argue that our ecological Marxist reading of hegemony, including the way in which capitalist politics organizes the metabolic relations of human and nature through the alienated mediation of capital and the state, can facilitate engagement with

advanced industrialized societies (like urban North America and Western Europe), as well as societies “against,” without, or beyond the state (like from his fieldwork in rural Madagascar) (see also Clastres 1987[1973]). The problem is that the unfreedom of capitalism is, in crucial ways, qualitatively distinct from the unfreedom of the state (including as a subject of sovereignty): whereas the state’s (sovereign’s) relations with its subjects is both formal and real hierarchy (domination), capitalism’s unfreedom is predicated upon the “dual freedoms” of exploitation; that is, that workers are alienated (“freed”) from their means of (self re-)production, and must thus “freely” sell their labor in exchange for wages to purchase the commodities necessary for self-reproduction. Thus, in societies where the production and consumption of commodities are (increasingly) necessary for (self-)reproduction (ie capitalist societies), there is little practical escape from the relations of domination, exploitation, and alienation intrinsic to commodity production, whereas, even in advanced industrialized societies, there is greater agency to counteract state authority. So this anarchist conception of direct action as anti-state praxis tends to overstate the ways in which direct action in capitalist societies are not just simply oriented towards the “production” of freedom (by seeking to produce spaces and relations beyond, without, or against the state), but must also be oriented as resistance against the concrete unfreedoms of capitalism. There is thus, perhaps, a “social” bias in terms of this definition of direct action (“acting as if we are already free”) in contrast to a more adequately ecological direct action; certainly there are libertarian values and motives beyond much ecological direct action and sabotage (especially by anarchists), however, in many cases (e.g. Keep It In The Ground and other anti-fossil direct action movements) the direct action is predicated on the concrete reality of the unfreedom of capitalism’s relationship with nature. 172 direct action as a distinctly ecological praxis with implications for a more ecologically sustainable mode of organizing the social metabolism of humans in nature.

In his consideration of direct action, Trautmann contrasts the interests and organization of the working class with that of the capitalist class. Trautmann notes that the capitalist class “are secured in their economic power by the ownership of land, mines, factories and transportation facilities” (2014[1912]: 31) – in other words, the means of production. However, “these possessions… have no value in themselves,” as “human labor power must be applied to these economic resources before they yield value, and thereby also assure power to one class to determine the relationship of the other class who invest their labor power in these industrial possessions” (ibid). But due to commodification of labor and requirement of workers to sell their labor power in exchange for wages, “the job itself is an inseparable and indispensable part of the economic possessions of the employing class, and consequently of their economic power” (ibid).

However, because the working class resists this concentration of economic wealth and material power, the capitalist class maintains “political institutions… used to protect this industrial power of the capitalist class, with the aid of courts, police, militia, jails, and legislative institutions” (Trautmann 2014: 31). That is, the capitalist class relies upon the political apparatuses of the state to maintain their economic power over the working class. The primary mode or expression of the capitalists’ political power lies with the

“indirect methods of the agencies of legislation and institutions for the execution of their mandates and law” (ibid). That is, the political power of the capitalist class is mediated

173 primarily in and through the apparatuses of the (integral) state. But, of course, the source or expression of their power is not strictly coercive in the direct expression of domination qua the (sovereign) authority of the state. There is also the “indirect” compulsion of labor derived from the alienated relation between workers and the means of their production, which compels “the millions who must have a job to live” to “acknowledge the employer’s sovereignty over [their] life conditions” (Trautman 32).

In contrast to the capitalist class, which relies upon the systematic coercion of the wage system, ie structural condition of exploitation through the “double freedom” of capitalism, backed by the violent mediation of the state, the power of the working class derives from its relationship to the production process itself. Because labor is the source of all value in society, workers occupy a critical role in the reproduction of society by being the source of the labor power necessary for the functioning of the social metabolism:

The applied labor power of the working class is the most indispensable part of that economic power wielded by the employing class. Without that there would be no production, and without production there would be no economic power at all (Trautmann 31).

Thus, by withdrawing their labor power, or better yet, by asserting direct control or authority over the direction (end) of their labor power, through the various forms of strikes, occupations, sit-downs, slow-downs, or even sabotage that are available to the working class, they are able to exercise and assert their power by (re)claiming control over the social metabolism.

174

However, Trautmann recognizes that it is foolish to insist that direct action is the

“only” method by which the working class can exercise their power, even if or although it may be the “principal” means by which they do so: “Those… who have analyzed the social system from all angles know that it would be ridiculous to attack the system with only one instrument” (Trautmann: 31, 51). Direct action must be understood as an integral part of a comprehensive framework of political praxis, but it is not the only method. Indirect action and methods, which constitute “political action… most of the time” (Trautmann 40), must also be deployed in conjunction with direct action. As a matter of fact, indirect political action can be understood as a necessary condition for the success of direct action: “Political rights must be secured and safeguarded” (Trautmann

52). But it would be equally shortsided to think that the working class can use the institutions and apparatuses of the state with the same capacity to achieve political objectives as the capitalist class: although Trautmann does not say this directly, we see a shared understanding of Poulantzas’s later conception that the state, as the materialization of class conflict in capitalist society, constitutes an uneven playing field in favor of the capitalist class. Thus it is necessary to take the struggle to the ‘economic’ sites of production, even if the ultimate objective is the political production of “a new reconstructed society, based on the control of the powers of production by the producers”

(Trautmann 55).111

111 “The political organization of the working class… if it is to be a class organization, would therefore be a reflex only of the desire to gain control of the political institutions, the object being to wield them for purposes diametrically opposed to the economic interests of those holding the economic power by their possession of the means of production, exchange, and the means of employment of wage labor” (Trautmann 33). 175

3.5. Conclusion

If labor is a transhistorical process for regulating the metabolic relations between humans and the rest of nature, hegemony represents the political means or mode of organizing that process. Thus, we can understand hegemony as a fundamentally ecological relation, one predicated upon organizing the relations of social (re)production within nature. This is counter to interpretations and understandings of hegemony as a strictly “social” process. It also enables us to conceptualize “alternative” modes or possibilities of or for hegemony, including conceptions of hegemony that are more adequately ecological and sustainable: that is, to borrow again from Peter Thomas’s reading of Gramsci’s concept/framework of hegemony, it enables the possibility of a “the possibility of a notion of a political ‘of a completely different type’… a notion and practice of ‘the political’ that would be adequate to the formation of what Gramsci calls a

‘self-regulated society’” (Thomas 2009b: 28-29). Unlike the nature of the political in capitalism – and all socio-ecological formations organized on the basis of class distinctions and hierarchies – this alternative, ecological conception of the political could thus be organized around a non-hierarchical, non-dominating mode of organizing politics.

What would this look like in practice? Left-wing thinkers from the communist, anarchist, and syndicalist traditions have highlighted the role that direct action plays as both a means and an end for emancipatory politics, one that could be both socially just and ecologically sustainable. Conceiving of direct action as a form of labor that is unmediated by capital or state, unlike the “indirect action” of other political forms and activities for which the ruling classes have a structural advantage, enables us to get closer

176 to what a more democratic and participatory mode of organizing the metabolic relations between humans and nature might look like. However, it is not enough to focus on direct action at the expense of other forms of political activity; rather, conceptualizing direct action in relation to both labor and hegemony helps us see it as part of a broader framework of ecological praxis. Ultimately, one way of conceptualizing what an ecological “politics of another type” ought to look like, one that could potentially be at least a part of a broader politics to “resolve” – rather than simply mitigate or adapt – the ecological crisis of climate change, would be understand that this ecological hegemony would be one in which the primary mode of organizing the metabolic process would be through direct action, rather than mediation by capital or state. For a democratically organized, ecologically-oriented direct action to become the hegemonic form of labor, such we might say is the task for a revolutionary ecological movement of the 21st

Century.

However, in order to get there from here, more work is needed to conceptualize the actually-existing conditions of capitalism’s ecological hegemony, or the hegemonic mode of organizing the reproduction of human and extra-human relations within nature of the capitalist ecological formation. Previously I have already noted that more work is needed to trace out the specifically ecological forms and relations of sovereignty and the nature of its relations with the capitalist social formation. Such a project is far beyond the scope of this particular dissertation project, but does suggest an important avenue for future research. With that said, it is worth highlighting at least three key features of capitalism’s ecological hegemony, from which we might be able to elicit some

177 preliminary ideas of the role and distinctions that sovereignty plays vis a vis capital in organizing or producing these relations. These three key features are alienation, exploitation, and domination.

First, it is worth noting that alienation is a fundamental precondition for both capital and state/sovereignty forms. As Saito (2017) notes, alienation was a central concept for Marx’s conception of the origins of capitalism, as the violent, material processes that disconnected workers from their relations with the land, the means of their

(re)production, and from each other was a necessary precondition for the development of the capitalist mode of production. Sovereignty too, it must be said, is also predicated upon such a separation between humans from the rest of nature, which is something that both Hobbes (1994) and Schmitt recognized: “The state of the leviathan excludes the state of nature” (2008: 47). The state of sovereignty is the state of alienation, between humans and nature as well as humans from other humans (ie the alienated relationship between the sovereign and its subjects).112 More work is needed to uncover the co- constitutive processes of sovereignty, alienation, and the production and (primitive) accumulation of capital.

A second key feature of capitalism’s hegemonic relationship with nature are relations of exploitation. For most traditional Marxists, exploitation is predominantly an economic condition or feature of capitalism, or even the defining injustice, contradiction, or antagonism that defines its relations, as capital’s relation with labor is inherently exploitative insofar as it is predicated upon extracting more value from what the workers

112 See also Derrida 2009. 178 are capable of producing than what could ever be returned or enjoyed by the worker themselves. At a more general level however, we can identify exploitation with a particular way of relating with the world and the human and extra-human natures within it: that is, to exploit something is to treat it instrumentally, as merely a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. Thus, instrumental reason has come to be the defining mode of rationality in capitalist society, as productive relations are organized so as to produce as much surplus value as possible. Thus the world and the (human and non-human) subjects within it are not regarded by capital as ends in themselves, but mere means to serving the end(less) accumulation of capital. As Karatani (2003) elaborates, we can thus identify an affinity between Marx and Kant’s respective intellectual-political projects insofar as they both can be read (together) as seeking to establish a “kingdom of ends” here on Earth, a society organized on an ethical-political basis of treating one another as ends in themselves, rather than in the instrumental means we currently relate. Moreover, the transcendental apperception that critical, reflexive thought is capable of achieving, coupled with social, material praxis, might enable more and better ways of relating more directly and ecologically with radical others in nature. The relationship between sovereignty, exploitation, and capital can perhaps be identified in the ways that states treat (human and extra-human) nature as resources to be exploited.

Finally, and perhaps most straightforwardly, the hierarchical relations of domination are embedded in capitalism’s hegemonic mode of organizing relations in nature. Both sovereignty and capital are predicated upon formal and informal hierchies and authoritative capacities. As a historical feature of capitalism, we can identify the

179 domination of human and extra-human natures in the legacies of imperialism, colonization, enslavement, racism, sexism, and other systems that have overlapped with and helped co-produce – but yet are not co-extensive with – the historical formation we call capitalism.

In the chapters which follow however, my focus will be on how these ecological forms of hegemony manifest in the two distinct political forms that are coming to define climate change in the 21st Century: the systemic movement of climate governance, and the anti-systemic movement of climate justice.

180

Part II – The Political Praxis of Climate Change: Climate Governance vs. Climate Justice

181

Chapter 4. Grounding the State and Civil Society in Global Climate Politics: Climate Governance and the Separation of the Political

4.1. Introduction: Climate Governance as Systemic Movement of Capitalist Climate Crisis

At the 2017 COP23 in Bonn, Germany, much attention was to the role and place of the United States. Just a few months before the annual event, recently-elected US

President Donald Trump (whose 2016 election occurred on the second day of the COP22 in Marrakech) announced that he would be following through on his campaign promise to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement.

US officials thus found themselves in a contradictory position. Formally, US negotiators and State Department officials representing Washington, including many holdovers from the Obama Administration, found themselves in a much lower profile inside the spaces of the conference. Among the many changes from previous years included a much smaller delegation and the US declining to host a space in the Country

Pavilion, normally an opportunity for nation-states to feature their commitments and highlight their progress on climate change. Instead, the sole high-profile event organized by the Trump Administration side event panel promoting coal, gas, and nuclear power.

Entitled “The Role of Cleaner and More Efficient Fossil Fuels and Nuclear Power in

Climate Mitigation,” the panel featured Trump Administration officials and energy industry representatives from Peabody Energy (the largest private coal company in the

182 world), Tellurian (a company specializing in liquid natural gas, obtained through fracking), and NuScale Power (committed to “safe, simple, small, economical, scalable nuclear power generation” for “all humankind”).113

But this was not the only place where US political officials and representatives could advocate US policy interests and strategies on climate change. Instead, a “rival US delegation” consisting of US governors, mayors, and business leaders organized an

“unofficial pavilion” under the banner “America’s Pledge: We Are Still In.”114

Established in July 2017, shortly after President Trump’s inauguration, by former New

York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and California Governor Jerry Brown, the

America’s Pledge initiative was organized as an attempt by “US subnational and non- state actors to affirm and demonstrate Americans’ collective comment to the Paris

Agreement and to supporting climate action to meet the nationally determined contribution made by the United States under that accord.”115 In Bonn, the America’s

Pledge contingent (also known as the “We Are Still In” coalition) hosted an unofficial

“US Climate Action Center.” The space, described by German media as “a large inflatable complex that resembles a cluster of giant igloos” and “the largest pavilion at the summit,” was located in a park outside and between the formally designated

UNFCCC conference spaces (ie the Bonn Zone, where the official negotiations occurred, and the Bonn Zone, the designated “civil society space” where the official pavilions were

113 USEA 2017; http://www.tellurianinc.com/about-us/ ; https://www.peabodyenergy.com/Who-We- Are/All-About-Peabody ; https://www.nuscalepower.com/about-us 114 Elkerbout 2017; Keating 2017a, 2017b, 2017c 115 https://www.americaspledgeonclimate.com/about/ 183 located).116 After passing through a security checkpoint (with metal detectors and bag checks, similar to that of the designated UNFCCC civil society spaces minus the badge system), observers and activists could mingle and attend events with US politicians, NGO representatives, and business representatives promoting alternatives to climate policy and energy development to those led by the federal government. The America’s Pledge contingent were clear in their messaging: that the Trump Administration does not represent US, and that if enough politicians, citizens, and business leaders come together, the United States can still meet its Paris commitments, even if the federal government is unwilling to do so. Ricardo Lara, a California state senator, described the delegation as

“the official resistance to the Trump administration”117

Much of the media attention and public discourse surrounding the US’s role at the

COP23 in Bonn focused on a narrative of “Two Americas” in global climate politics.118

On the one hand, there is federal government, which represents the US in its formal, external relations with other sovereign nation-states. On the other hand, the America’s

Pledge coalition represented a much more diverse array of actors and interest groups.

Much of the discourse around the “Two Americas” at the COP23 emphasized the separation and distinction between the two coalitions.

Importantly, the discourse surrounding the America’s Pledge coalition reflects much of the growing consensus in the emergent literature around climate mitigation and adaptation: that the efforts and commitments by nation-states at the level of national

116 Keating 2017b 117 Ibid. 118 Morton 2017; Finnegan and Ebbs 2017 184 policy and international commitments are not enough to address climate change, and that more and greater action by actors and organizations across scale (from the local and municipal to the regional and transnational), including by non-state actors, are necessary.

Observers and advocates for this ‘rescaling’ of climate governance highlight a number of perceived advantages for these increased roles by actors, organizations, and institutional structures beyond the traditional nation-state or formal structures of international organizations. First, these actors and institutions are seen as having more flexibility, adaptability, and greater potential for innovation. Finally, they are seen as more representative of greater and more diverse sets of perspectives and interest groups.

These points are thus perceived to be clearly exacerbated in the context of the contemporary United States, where many of the key institutions of the federal nation- state have been “captured” by so-called “special interests” aligned with the fossil fuel industry. Even beyond the revolving door between regulatory agencies and the industries they are supposed to regulate are the more egregious examples, such as the appointment of Rex Tillerson to Secretary of State, corruption and irregularities inside the EPA. While there are seemingly cynical attempts to reconcile sustainability with fossil fuel interests

(including the adoption of Obama Administration language of “all of the above” energy policy programs to support aging coal burning power plants), the Trump Administration appears to revel in its openly anti-ecological standpoint, embodied in chauvinistic programs like “Energy Dominance.”

185

For these reasons, it makes sense that pro-climate activists would seek to target the Trump Administration’s sole presence at the negotiations at their panel promoting fossil fuels and nuclear energy. This is precisely what organizers from SustainUS and other US-based climate justice organizations and allies did. A few minutes into the panel presentation, a large group of activists (comprising approximately half the audience) staged an intervention: to the tune of “I’m Proud to Be an American,” the activists stood and sang “So you claim to be an American, but we see right through your greed; it’s killing all across the world, for the coal money; but we proudly stand up until you keep it in the ground; let the people of the world unite, and we are here to stay…” They repeated this for several minutes, as the panel and rest of the audience sat and watched mostly in silence, before the activists marched out of the room where they were met with media and other supporters. Several of the organizers gave interviews and an impromptu press conference was held, where activists elaborated on their reasons for organizing the action and points in criticizing the panel and Trump Administration. After the disruption, the panel continued but the panelists were clearly jarred, with at least half the audience having vacated the room and several questions in the Q&A highlighting points raised by the activists. The action gained a significant amount of media coverage, which overshadowed the presence of the panel and their talking points.119

However, the Trump Administration’s climate policy was not the only American target by climate justice activists at the COP23. Just one day prior to the fossil panel singing walkout, another group of climate justice activists and organizers, also associated

119 For more, see e.g.: Keating 2017d; Democracy Now! 2017; Lemle 2017 186 with the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice (DCJ) and including several

SustainUS members (who took part as independent individuals, and not on behalf of their organization120), also organized a similar intervention against a keynote speaker at the

America’s Pledge Launch event, Democratic Governor of California and America’s

Pledge co-founder Jerry Brown. This smaller group of activists organized a “popcorn” style disruption, as they divided into various groups seated around the room. A few minutes into Gov. Brown’s speech, the first sub-group, comprised of indigenous elders representing frontline communities in California, stood up and began verbally challenging the California Democrat on his environmental record, highlighting the pollution from California’s refinery industry. After a short back and forth between the first group of protestors and the speaker, another group of protestors in another part of the room stood up to criticize California’s carbon trading program, which they protestors argued was a “false solution” whose offsetting credits were jeopardizing indigenous communities in the Amazon. After this, another group emerged, criticizing the methane pollution from California’s hydrocarbon plants (“Methane leaks!”). And this continued until all of the groups had emerged and were escorted from the premises. In a moment that gained some notoriety in social media, Governor Brown, responding to the climate justice slogan “Keep it in the ground,” replied with “I’ll put you in the ground!” At various periods throughout the intervention, America’s Pledge supporters in the audience

120 The SustainUS members present or who took part in the America’s Pledge action told me that they did so independently, and not on behalf of their organization because, in addition to being a member organization of the DCJ network, SustainUS is also a member of the Climate Action Network, which has rules prohibiting public criticism of CAN affiliates within the network. So SustainUS would risk disbarment from CAN if they openly sponsored this protest against a CAN-affiliated event. (Author’s observation) 187 began their own chant “We’re still in!,” to which several of the climate justice activists responded “Still in for what?!”121

What can we read from these events regarding the relations between states and civil society in global climate politics? Why, in other words, would climate justice activists target fellow civil society actors during an event that was intended to support and represent their interests? What does the relationship of the climate justice movement to the “Two Americas” represented at the COP23 tell us about the state of global governance of climate change?

In this chapter, I apply my Marxist ecological framework towards an analysis of the politics of climate governance. I begin by reviewing the existing attempts by global environmental politics scholars to describe and analyze the emergent climate governance apparatus. I then provide my own, Gramscian-inspired framing that focuses on four key historical blocs in global climate politics, or what I call “climate blocs”: a Green

Capitalist bloc; Fossil Capitalist bloc; Developing Capitalist bloc; and a Climate Justice bloc (which is examined in more detail in Chapter 5). I then provide an overview of how the ecological hegemony of capitalism is manifest in two dimensions of climate governance at the international level: the formal separation of state and civil society in the UNFCCC, and the subsumption of the Earth system to capital in the Paris Agreement.

121 These descriptions are based on fieldwork observations as a participant-observer at the COP23 in Bonn, 2017. I attended DCJ action meetings where both actions were planned, where I was a direct observer to the planning for the action targeting Governor Brown at the America’s Pledge event. I also watched the action against the Trump Administration’s pro-fossil panel via livestream at Democracy Now! There was far less coverage of the America’s Pledge event protest than the one targeting the pro-fossil panel; for a notable exception, see Aronoff 2017. 188

4.2. The Nature of Climate Governance

Among political scientific approaches to the politics of climate change, none is so hegemonic today as that of climate governance. Climate governance is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry and praxis where there are no strict lines between what is merely theoretical versus practical. Climate governance represents a distinct shift from previous generations of research in global environmental politics in which regime theory and institutionalist approaches predominated. The predominance of regime theory and institutionalist approaches can be seen as corresponding with a period of time, from the

1970s until the early 2000s, when the mainstream consensus was that international regulatory regimes were seen as the prime locus of global environmental management.

However, in the face of changing global political dynamics amid structural changes in the global economy, including the end of the Bretton Woods era and subsequent neoliberalization and globalization of the capitalist state system, approaches to global governance began to emerge as early as the 1990s that distinguished themselves from the previous eras of regime theory and institutionalism by calling attention to the multifaceted nature of governance.

First, and arguably above all else, governance is defined by the devolution or dispersal of political authority away from the locus of the modern nation-state, ‘upwards’ towards transnational authorities and institutions (e.g. the European Union) and

‘downwards’ towards sub-national (e.g. municipal governments) and non-state (e.g. corporations, NGOs) actors and networks. This redistribution of political authority and

189 action, both vertically (across scale) and horizontally (across sector),122 can be read as part of a broader historical process and trajectory that we can trace across the international system since at least the 1970s. Governance, in other words, can be read as part of a broader set of political developments in the capitalist world-system that we also associate with neoliberalism and globalization. Neoliberalism is a notoriously elastic term, which in this context I consider as part of the broader geopolitical and economic shifts in the wake of the end of the postwar Bretton Woods system and transition towards more market-based reform systems. This also includes the accompanying ideological tendencies we associate with neoliberalism, including the propensity towards the dissemination of market rationality as an ordering principle of society and epistemology.123 Among the many shifts in the global capitalist economy throughout this period of time we see, among the wealthy, industrialized capitalist core of the North

Atlantic, an increasing predominance of money capital or finance capital over commodity capital or material accumulation, and a concurrent shift in the center of accumulation eastward (towards China and the Asia-Pacific region more generally).124 Accordingly, these processes are also considered a part of (neoliberal) ‘globalization’ insofar as they are part and parcel of the expansion of the capitalist world-system towards a global scale, especially in the wake of fall of the Soviet Union and the full inclusion of China within the global capitalist world-economy.125

122 Andonova and Mitchell 2010 123 For more on neoliberalism, see, e.g.: Larner 2000; Saad-Filho and Johnston, eds 2005; Harvey 2005; Leitner, Peck, and Sheppard, eds 2007; Steger and Roy 2010; Davies 2014; Davies 2016; Karatani 2018 124 Arrighi 2010[1994]; Arrighi 2007 125 Globalization has a similarly complex and contested intellectual and political history: for more on globalization, see, e.g.: Steger 2003; Rupert and Smith, eds 2002; Appelbaum and Robinson, eds 2005; 190

At the same time, as a political relation, governance is generally understood to be more ‘horizontal’ or ‘reciprocal,’ rather than vertical or unilateral, as in the traditional conception of political authority qua sovereignty. That said, lines between governance and sovereignty are fundamentally blurred in international relations due to the anarchical structure of world politics: that is, the plurality of polities claiming sovereignty, and the social recognition of this status that constitutes the sine qua non of international sovereignty, means that as an ordering force of world politics, sovereignty necessarily has a horizontal and reciprocal dimension as well. In international relations, sovereignty is, at least in part, constituted in and through mutual recognition (even if this mutual recognition is unevenly distributed). Note, however, that in domestic (as opposed to international) politics, these relations are inverted: sovereignty and governance are fundamentally hierarchical, insofar as they both presume a relationship between the sovereign and subject, governor and governed.

While the governance literature has expanded considerably among various domains in political science and IR (e.g. security, economics, human rights, development), there are several features of climate change that make it particularly suited for governance approaches. For one, environmental politics as a field has developed predominantly from many of the same intellectual-practical origins. Most of the first and second generations of environmental politics research in IR developed among institutionalists and regime theorists, such that for most of its history “environmental

Ritzer, ed 2013. For more on the relationship between globalization and governmentality (ie neoliberal governance), see Larner and Walters 2004. China’s path to capitalism can be traced at least as early as Deng’s reforms in the late 1970s and culminating with China’s membership status in the WTO in 2001 (Nolan 2019; for more, see the rest of the “Debating China” forum in New Left Review 115, 2019). 191 politics” has been as much a disciplinary subset of the (international) organizations/institutions sub-fields as a sub-field in itself.126

As Andonova et al (2009) note, there are also a number of other features of climate change that make it particularly suited for governance approaches as well. First, climate change is an issue that affects, and is affected by, a wide variety of “advocacy and business interests whose interests and activities span borders and scales” (Andonova et al 2009: 57). Second, climate change is a highly complex issue with great “need for policy coordination vertically, horizontally, and across sectors” (ibid). Additionally, “new opportunities and incentives for transnational governance” have been opened up by the

Kyoto Protocol and the broader climate regime complex (Andonova et al 2009: 58; see also Keohane and Victor 2011). Finally, Andonova et al also note that “the evolving political landscape and variable involvement of nation-states in climate cooperation provides additional incentives and terrain for the building of transnational governance networks" (2009: 58). This is another way of saying that the consistent failures to produce binding obligations at the international level have necessitated a shift towards

126 I consider the “first generation” of (international) environmental politics research to roughly correspond with the predominantly regime theoretical and (neo)liberal institutionalist work of scholars like Oran Young and Robert Keohane (among many others), whose origins can be traced among the 1970s to the late 1980s/early 1990s. The emergence of a second generation of environmental scholarship can be found concurrent with the expansion of constructivism in IR and political science in the late 1980s throughout the 1990s in the work of scholars like Paul Wapner and Ken Conca. Environmental and climate governance approaches arguably constitute a third generation of scholarship (from the late 1990s/early 2000s onward). I would also add, cautiously, that in this second decade of the new millennium, we are witnessing the emergence of a fourth generation of international environmental politics research that draws more explicitly upon radical and Marxist critiques of capitalism, thereby overlapping with the Ecosocialist/Marxist ecology research programs (see Chapter 2). This is, of course, a preliminary sketch of a disciplinary history of (international) environmental politics research, and a number of exceptions exist, particularly feminist and other critical approaches from scholars like Robyn Eckersley and Karen Litfin, who have been writing on global environmental politics at least as long as many prominent institutionalists/regime theorists. 192 greater roles for transnational, sub-national, and non-state political actors, features that are central to the contemporary Paris regime complex (Keohane and Victor 2011).

To understand the meaning and use of “governance” in practice, it is important to consider it in context. Governance, unlike institutions or regimes more strictly speaking, is not a thing but a process. As a concept, governance is derived from the act of governing, and yet ‘governance’ (as a concept, practice, and research program) has itself been developed historically in distinction or opposition to ‘government,’ traditionally understood. Among the most widely cited definitions and conceptions of governance comes from the work of James Rosenau, an international relations scholar who contributed to the expansion and development of the literature on international organizations and regime theory in the 1970s, but later came to be a leading figure in the discourse and debates around global governance in the early 1990s. Rosenau was a co- editor and wrote the introduction to an influential volume published in 1992 entitled

Governance Without Government: Order and Change in World Politics. In a widely quoted passage from his introduction, Rosenau defines governance as

not synonymous with government. Both refer to purposive behavior, to goal-oriented activities, to systems of rule; but government suggests activities that are backed by formal authority, by police powers to insure the implementation of duly constituted policies, whereas governance refers to activities backed by shared goals that may or may not derive from legal and formally prescribed responsibilities and that do not necessarily rely on police powers to overcome defiance and attain compliance. Governance, in other words, is a more encompassing phenomenon than government. It embraces governmental institutions, but it also subsumes informal, non-governmental mechanisms whereby those persons and organizations within its purview move ahead, satisfy their needs, and fulfill their wants. Governance is thus a system of rule that is as dependent on intersubjective meanings as on formally sanctioned constitutions and charters. Put more emphatically, governance is a system of rule that works 193

only if it is accepted by the majority (or, at least, by the most powerful of those it affects), whereas governments can function even in the face of widespread opposition to their policies (Rosenau 1992: 4)

Rosenau goes on to note that, in contrast to regimes,

governance in a global order is not confined to a single sphere of endeavor. It refers to the arrangements that prevail in the lacunae between regimes and, perhaps more importantly, to the principles, norms, rules, and procedures that come into play when two or more regimes overlap, conflict, or otherwise require arrangements that facilitate accommodation among the competing interests (1992: 9)

As we can see, governance is a more expansive and inclusive conceptualization of

“purposive authority,” “goal-oriented activities,” and “systems of rule” than either government or regimes. Governance is “a more encompassing phenomenon” in that it both includes but goes beyond what is otherwise included within the conceptions of governments or regimes (Rosenau 1992: 4).

This expansive conceptualization of governance is similarly indicated in how the concept has been taken up by scholars of climate politics. A good indicator of the extent to which a prevailing ideological conception is hegemonic is the degree to which its definition or understanding is given or taken-for-granted. This is evident among a number of leading accounts of global climate change governance, whereby “governance of climate change” or “climate governance” are listed in the title, and yet there is little systematic attempt to define or bound the concept. Consider, for a first example, a 2011 volume entitled The Governance of Climate Change: Science, Economics, Politics &

Ethics. With “governance” as the overarching, unifying framework, “science,”

“economics,” “politics,” and “ethics” are all effectively subsumed within its purview. 194

Climate governance thus becomes the sum total of the outcomes of processes and actions to generate knowledge and action to address and resolve the challenges posed by climate change.127 Similarly, a 2013 volume on Climate Governance in the Developing World similarly gives no explicit definition or conception of “climate governance,” but rather it is implicitly asserted that governance = policymaking, which in this context refers to policymaking relevant to climate change among non-Annex I countries.128 Joyeeta

Gupta’s The History of Global Climate Governance (2014), a somewhat auspiciously, and given its rather slim length (244 pages, all inclusive), ironically, titled volume, focuses almost exclusively on the history of the global environmental negotiations of the

UNFCCC, with very little attention paid to sub-national dynamics (ie political processes occurring within the boundaries of individual nation-states, rather than dynamics at the

127 The book’s self-description on the back cover makes this clear: Climate change poses one of the greatest challenges for human society in the twenty-first century, yet there is a major disconnect between our actions to deal with it and the gravity of the threat it implies. In a world where the fates of countries are increasingly intertwined, how should we think about, and accordingly, how should we manage, the types of risk posed by anthropogenic climate change? The problem is multifaceted, and involves not only technical and policy-specific approaches, but also questions of social justice and sustainability. (Held, Hervey, and Theros 2011) Here can see a number of implicit features of governance: First, note the intertwined relationship between theory (“how should we think about”) and praxis (“how should we manage”), as governance involves both thinking and doing. Next, there is an equation (or reduction) of the sum total of “our actions to deal with [climate change]” with the “governance” approaches discussed in the text. Upon closer reading, the sum of these governance approaches comes to mean those which impact upon “policy,” as in “the problem of climate change has moved from the realm of scientific research and environmental advocacy into mainstream political and economic policy discussions at all levels of governance” (Held, Hervey, and Theros 2011: 1). Last but not least, questions of governance are seen as necessarily involving not only “technical and policy-specific approaches,” but also “questions of social justice and sustainability,” thereby presuming (and arguably subsuming) the inherent compatibility or at least possibility of reconciling social justice and sustainability with governance. 128 From the back cover: “The authors map the evolution of climate policies in [twelve states from across Asia, the Americas, and Africa] and examine the complex array of actors, interests, institutions, and ideas Unlike the other volumes I discuss in this paragraph, there is an entry for “climate governance” in the index, though it refers to the editor’s introduction as a whole, which does little more than summarize the arguments from the following chapters. 195 international sphere across nation-states). Note that in other literatures on climate governance, including or especially perspectives emphasizing transnational climate governance, the boundaries between what is strictly “global” and “international” versus

“transnational” or even “domestic” climate politics or governance are very blurry, and indeed, the very nature of climate change as a problem that takes place across multiple scales (temporal, geographical, political, etc.) makes it a particularly ‘diabolical’ or

‘wicked’ policy problem (Steffen 2011; see also Levin et al 2012; Jamieson 2014).

These implicit definitions of climate governance are symptomatic of more general ideological features characteristic of the hegemony of liberal capitalism. On the one hand,

“governance” subsumes the roles and practices of state as well as presumably non-state actors (corporations, NGOs, movements, even arguably individuals) and institutions

(private law, self-regulatory norms) within its purview. That is, governance can be taken to stand in for practically the entire field of “politics” so considered. To the extent that governance is defined as the collective pursuit of the public good, which in many conceptions happens to cohere with the desired end of politics properly considered, then

“climate governance” thus comes to mean or be associated with the “doing something

[good]” or “addressing the public goods problem” on climate change (re: mitigation, adaptation, finance, etc.). On the other hand, to the extent that “politics” is seen as something distinct from governance, it comes to be associated with all that is messy, complicated, inefficient, and, in many cases, even bad about climate change: the heated debates over responsibility and accountability; the conflicting interests and value judgements; the geopolitical impasse over binding emissions reductions commitments

196 consistent with the science; even climate denialism itself, these are all associated with

“political” factors or obstacles that inhibit the potential for effective (“good”) climate governance.129

Here it is worth highlighting a fundamental feature of governance, one that all too often is overlooked or underestimated by many of its proponents, especially when it comes to climate change: ultimately, governance is about the exercise of power, including (but not exclusively) through the force of coercion, towards the end of maintaining or preserving an existing political systemic order. Andonova et al (2009) highlight three features of governance that are common across sectors and domestic as well as transnational spheres. The first is the public nature of governance objectives and goals, that “governance seeks to achieve some form of public good” (55). This is the feature that is almost always made explicit in definitions and conceptions of governance, that governance serves the common good and/or seeks the resolution of public goods problems. Indeed, among governance, regime, and policy theorists more broadly, collective action or public goods problems are often not just conceived as problems in themselves, but as threats to public order or systemic stability. Certainly among political approaches to climate change, among the many reasons highlighted for the salience of its relevance as a political problem is the fact that climate change poses a threat to geopolitical, economic, etc. systems and order.130

129 Here it’s worth recalling the early origins of the governance literature focused not just on governance in the abstract, but “good governance,” ie overcoming the political obstacles that produce “bad” governance. 130 This can be seen in Green New Deal text 197

The second two features are more frequently ignored, left implicit, or are perhaps more contested, precisely because they are more explicitly political. One is that governance is “ordered and intentional” (Andonova et al 2009: 55). Against this,

Andonova et al note that while “some authors stress the importance of ‘self- organization’” in governance, empirically they see “little support for the sort of horizontal power relations and mutuality of constitution that this approach indicates”

(2009: 55 fn 24). Instead, they recognize a central role for “steering,” or the use of public and private capacities to create incentives and sanctions (ie through the use of coercion as well as consent) to “provid[e] direction towards particular goals” (Andonova et al 2009:

55).

Last but not least, and certainly related to the previous feature of governance as steering capacity: governance is “authoritative” as “it rests upon a mutual recognition between the governor(s) and the governed, a process that is subject to significant contention” (Andonova et al 2009: 56-7). In other words, against those that take governance to be inherently more democratic, consensual, and/or horizontal in contrast to more traditional forms of government (that are by contrast more authoritarian, coercive, and vertical), we see a continuity between governance and state authority, especially insofar as both are defined by a necessary distinction, and hierarchy, between the ruler(s) and the ruled.

A number of other authors have picked up on this thread of governance as the exercise of power in the realm of climate change, among others. Radical and critical approaches to climate governance are fairly common in the academic literature, with a

198 significant number of scholars drawing upon Foucault, and to a somewhat lesser extent

Gramsci. Okereke, Bulkeley, and Schroeder (2009) show how Foucauldian and Neo-

Gramscian approaches can bring light to bear on how we conceptualize climate governance. Somewhat ironically, at least when considering the emancipatory potential or intent of Gramsci’s Marxist framework, is the fact that the perceived benefits of using such an approach for studying climate governance are defined either in predominantly scholarly/intellectual terms, or for better helping the functioning of climate governance

(within the current, capitalist system).

I argue that even these approaches that take avowedly radical or critical approaches to climate governance fail to take into account, or at a minimum underestimate, a central feature of all forms of governance: that it presumes a form of systemic order, and is predicated upon reproducing that order. Early in Rosenau’s seminal article, he notes that governance, at its most basic level, is about maintaining a system’s “functional needs” (1992: 3). Later, he elaborates the relationship between governance and systemic order and functioning when drawing a contrast with government (ie the state):

governance is always effective in performing the functions necessary to systemic persistence, else it is not conceived to exist (since instead of referring to ineffective governance, one speaks of anarchy or chaos). Governments, on the other hand, can be quite ineffective without being regarded as non-existent (they are viewed simply as "weak") (Rosenau 1992: 5)

For the global governance of climate change, the fact that governance is predicated upon maintaining the existing system or order is no small matter. This means that governance

199 cannot be assumed to be politically neutral, or even an unvarnished “good” or end/telos of politics as some governance and policy scholars appear to suggest.131 In contrast to leading accounts that posit climate governance, implicitly or explicitly, to be a necessary goal, end, or even solution for the climate change, I draw upon my Marxist ecological framework to argue that climate governance represents the systemic movement of the capitalist climate crisis. That is, climate governance represents the political form of capitalist management of the climate crisis, and, as such, by reproducing the ecological contradictions of the capitalist nation-state system, serves to reproduce, rather than resolve, the crisis. I contribute to our understanding of climate governance as a systemic movement of capitalism by tracing out how it is shaped by hegemonic struggles among four key historical blocs in global climate politics: a Green Capitalist (GC) climate bloc; a Fossil Capitalist (FC) climate bloc; a Developing Capitalist (DC) climate bloc; and a subaltern Climate Justice bloc (CJ).

4.3. Climate Blocs in World Politics

131 This point is perhaps even more salient among normative political theorists, for whom the goal of normative theory is, ultimately, to help inform policy-making. For example, Brooke Ackerley notes that most problems of climate injustice are, according to her, problems of climate governance – the implicit assumption or logical conclusion being that governance is also, necessarily, part of the solution. By contrast, the approach I take comes to a different conclusion: that problems of climate justice are also problems of climate governance, but because both derive from the structural-systemic contradictions and antagonisms of the systemic order (capitalism), thus ultimately necessitating a (revolutionary) form of politics that can not only resist, but ultimately overcome, the governance and reproduction of the existing systemic order. 200

4.3.1. Green Capital Bloc

If one wanted to try to geographically locate the “core” or epicenter of what I call the Green Capital climate bloc, we could do worse than locate it in the Cologne-Bonn region of Western Germany. Bonn is, of course, the location of the Secretariat of the

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, making it the de facto political capital of the global climate governance regime. With its neighbor to the north,

Cologne, with whom the two cities share an airport, Cologne and Bonn are together part of the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region, which is the largest metropolitan region in

Germany, continental Europe’s largest economy. The Rhine-Ruhr region lies entirely with the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany’s most populous), and is one of the most important industrial regions in the world. The Rhine-Ruhr is also responsible for [a significant proportion of Germany, and the EU’s carbon emissions]. It also happens to be the home of the largest open pit coal mine in the world, the Hambacher coal mine, located less than a one hour automobile ride from the Secretariat in Bonn.

Germany is in the midst of its “Energy Transition,” which has been hailed as a model for success by ecological modernization and green capitalism advocates. However this program has been criticized by observers as basically being a bailout for fossil fuel industry interests in Germany; economists have noted that the projected phaseout basically tracks the projected value and production of coal and other fossil fuels in

Germany based on more strictly defined economic (market-based) factors and dynamics.

In other words, the Energy Transition is thus more of cushion or welfare state support

201 system for fossil fuel companies that might otherwise be expected to make the transition at cost to them.

Beyond Germany and the broader EU, we can further identify progressive elements of the US political and capitalist classes in the advanced industrialized countries of the capitalist core, specifically in the United States. The America’s Pledge coalition is perhaps the best representation of this segment of the Green Capital bloc in North

America. While much less of a formal political institution than the EU (which is much closer to being a transnational state apparatus than ‘merely’ constituting a historical bloc132), the America’s Pledge coalition includes state and non-state actors within it.

Among these are states like California, which is one of the largest subnational economies in the world with a population and GDP similar to that of an EU member like Spain, and corporations like Wal-Mart, which is the largest private employer in the world.

Alongside these (transnational and subnational) states and corporations there are also traditional non-governmental organizations. In other words, any consideration of the

Green Capitalist bloc in global climate politics must consider the role and place of the

132 Recall that historical blocs can, and frequently do, include “state” actors within them. A state actor may exercise sovereignty (ie hegemonic authority) in one dimension of its political relations, while sharing a much more dispersed or diversified authoritative power relation in another dimension. Hence, the EU may constitute the hegemonic authority when it comes to adjudicating economic matters within its common market that may have direct implications for climate politics via greenhouse gas emissions, however the actual production and exercise of its climate policy can be read as co-produced through its shared political relations with similarly-interested organizations and actors in the UNFCCC (e.g. the America’s Pledge coalition, CAN). Similarly, the state of California, in its internal relations with its markets and citizens, exercises sovereign authority over its subjects, yet must share its authoritative capacity to exercise power when collaborating with non-state actors as part of the coalition, or when resisting policies and directives at the federal level of the United States. In other words, the process of obtaining sovereign authority is the process by which a historical bloc becomes a state, at which point it obtains a qualitatively distinct form of political authority: the (sovereign) capacity to exercise and adjudicate its own authority as an end in itself, ie the obtainment of status of “final authority.” 202

Climate Action Network (CAN). CAN is the largest and arguably most important non- governmental organization in the world that does work on climate change. CAN is a network constituency organization, which means that its primary task is the self- organization of its network, which comprises over 1400 NGOs that do work on climate change and are registered as civil society observer organizations within one or more of the nine constituency groups that represent civil society within the UNFCCC. CAN thus serves a necessary role within the context of the United Nations system for it both represents as well as provides coherence among its member organizations. CAN represents itself as an apolitical authority: besides their mandate to organize and represent the interests of their organizational constituents, they claim to have no political stances defined independent of the organizations that comprise them. As one CAN representative described it to me, CAN is necessarily a big tent organization that represents a broad and diverse array of organizations and interest groups, and thus CAN’s positions must necessarily be “middle of the road” and a “common denominator” for all member groups.133 CAN can thus be read as serving a similar “orchestrative” function for non- governmental actors in the spaces of civil society as international organizations like the

UNFCCC or Global Environment Facility serve for nation-states in the spaces of international politics.134

Perhaps the most succinct way of summarizing the core objective or main goal of the Green Capitalist bloc is an orderly transition to a post-fossil economy, and/or the

133 Interview with Mathias Bouuaert (CAN-International) 134 For more on orchestration in global climate politics, see Abbott 2012; Graham and Thompson 2015. 203 realization of a “green capitalism.” Importantly, there is a relative agnosticism as to how this might be accomplished most effectively. This lack of consensus about how this transition might be coordinated is perhaps the greatest political challenge facing the

Green Capitalist bloc as it struggles to maintain its leadership in its external relations, in and through the regime complex for climate change and beyond, as well as maintain political cohesion and coordinate its interests in its internal relations (as a historical bloc with its own internal dynamics). For decades, the predominant consensus within the

Green Capitalist bloc was that market-based instruments (such as cap and trade and carbon offsets) were the most efficient mechanisms for maintaining capital’s ability to reproduce and accumulate while orchestrating or otherwise facilitating climate mitigation and adaptation policies. However, in the face of decades of ineffective policy implementation and the seemingly perpetually “cheap” carbon, the tide appears to be turning and there is greater consensus that carbon taxes may not only be politically viable but necessary. Outside the US there has always been a consensus that greater state intervention in the form of spending (not just taxation) to incentivize “greener” production is a necessary part of such a transition, however due to the predominance of cost-cutting and neoliberal tendencies within even the “progressive” sectors of the United

States, these policies have failed to gain political traction. However, current political dynamics in the US, including a wave of anti-incumbency that rejects the Trump

Administration, which is also being buoyed by the renewal of class-based political discourse since the 2008 financial crisis, such as that represented by the movements and leadership around figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, means that

204

Keynesianism (as a political movement and ideology) is potentially facing its greatest resurgence in the US since the end of the Bretton Woods era. What this means in the more restricted context of dynamics within the Green Capitalist bloc is that we observe more cohesion than dissent when it comes to evaluating the debates and relations among so-called “neoliberal” and “Keynesian” approaches to climate politics; they are predominantly differences in degree, rather than in quality.

The biggest questions and challenges facing the Green Capitalist bloc concern the compatibility of their objectives with the hegemonic projects of the Fossil Capitalist and

Developing Capitalist blocs. Regarding the former, it seems clear that Fossil Capital will do everything in its power to resist the imposition of costs it considers undue or incompatible with their own reproduction, that is, it will resist any and all efforts to strand fossilized assets beyond what their books can hold. Given the fact that meeting the mitigation goals of the Paris Agreement would require precisely that, it is unclear whether anything resembling an “orderly” phaseout of fossil fuels can be achieved without significant costs, political or otherwise. That is, we ought to expect the Green

Capitalist bloc to forsake its “ecological” objectives (ie maintaining stability or order of planetary carbon system) for its “economic-political” objectives (ie maintainting stability or order of global capitalist system), as achieving or realizing the former may require forsaking the latter for costs that will be more immediately and directly felt than those of sacrificing the former for the latter (political instability would result more directly and immediately if, for example, the Bernie Sanders administration attempted to nationalize all US fossil fuel companies, than if ‘business-as-usual’ is allowed to continue to play

205 out, whereby the social-political-ecological costs of rising temperatures will be much more diffuse, including across generations such that future generations will continue to suffer more than current generations that would endure “political” costs of confronting fossil capital).

4.3.2. Fossil Capital Bloc

Choosing a geographical center of the Fossil Capital Bloc in global climate politics is arguably less straightforward than its neoliberal/Keynesian counterpart.

Certainly, there are a number of candidates worth considering on symbolic value alone:

Houston, Texas is certainly a good candidate, given its size and role in not only the country with the largest economy in the world (and the second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions), but in the global fossil capitalist economy. Houston, whose former professional football team was named “The Oilers,” holds one of the largest and most important ports in the global economy. It is also holds effective symbolic value on account of embodying some of the most profound social and ecological contradictions of our global economy. A textbook example of postwar low-density urban development and runaway sprawl, with thousands of hectares of prairies and swamps bulldozed, drained, and paved over, Houston became an important case site in the development of the field of environmental justice, as the sociologist Robert Bullard, one of the pioneering scholars of environmental racism and environmental (in)justice, based much of his early work, and

206 indeed became drawn into the field of environmental issues, based on his experience living and working in Houston.135

But there are other candidates worth considering as well. Given the nature of the contemporary, fossil-fueled world-system, and the fluidity of fossil capital as fossil finance, for purely economic value alone one could just as easily consider locating the core of the fossil economy bloc in Dallas (where most of the oil companies who do business in Houston are actually headquartered) or for that matter New York City (where all of the Fortune 500 energy companies who do business in fossil fuels are listed). Given the depth and scale of the fossil economy on a global scale, one could of course consider going outside the United States, to a variety of countries, like Saudi Arabia or Russia, where fossil-based economies go hand in hand with the authoritarian political regimes that appear necessary to support such ecologically destructive practices.136 We could even go to China, considering China is the largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, largely due to the fact that on an annual basis since 2011, China burns almost as much coal as the rest of the world combined. However, given that the United States recently reclaimed its title as the largest producer of fossil fuels, thanks in large part to the massive expansion of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) technologies and auspicious economic-political conditions (declining costs of extraction and production, lax

135 See Bullard’s books – I also happened to witness Bullard speak at length about his experiences in Houston and how that shaped his early work on environmental racism and justice when he was awarded the American Association of Geographer’s “Honorary Geographer” award at the 2018 annual convention in New Orleans. 136 Mitchell (2011) of course distinguishes between the political effects of coal and oil, basically arguing that while authoritarianism follows oil, democracy follows coal. It is unclear whether/how this theory travels to Russia, given Russia relies heavily on both coal and oil (as well as natural gas). 207 regulatory apparatuses, and incentives for “cleaner” sources of carbon energy than coal or petroleum) for fossilized natural gas during the Obama Administration, it would make sense for us to locate the epicenter of the Fossil Capital bloc in Washington, DC, where

US President Donald Trump also makes a fitting representation of fossil capital’s political form personified.

As far as summarizing the core political objective of the fossil capital bloc, perhaps the most succinct definition is something along the lines of “no stranded assets”

– that is, fossil capital is defined by its drive to reproduce itself through the appropriation, extraction, and production of fossil fuel reserves available on the planet.

4.3.3. Developing Capital Bloc

Whether within the industrial manufacturing complexes of Guangdong Province, the largest subnational economic unit in the world, or closer to the coal-rich regions north of the capital Beijing, China is the best candidate for the location of the core or leading state within the Developing Capital Bloc. Not only is China the second largest economy in the world, and the largest greenhouse gas emitter and consumer of the dirtiest fossil fuel (coal), China is also the leader of the China and G-77 negotiating bloc in the

UNFCCC, which is the largest and most important coalition of developing countries in the climate regime. China, much like Germany, also embodies many of the contradictions that capitalist economies confront with the climate crisis and the necessary transition to a post-fossil economy. China very quickly has the become the largest producer, consumer, and exporter of alternative, renewable, and low-carbon energy technologies, mostly

208 related to solar and wind energy. China also happens to contain within its borders137 some of the world’s largest deposits of several of the rare Earth mineral used in renewable battery technology that is necessary to store and exchange electricity generated through wind and solar, which further positions the country as a leader when it comes to the future of the world-system in general and the developing world in particular.

It has been on the back of their fossil fueled capitalist development trajectory that has not only propelled China into becoming the ‘workshop of the world,’ as part of the broader historical and geographical pivot of the world-economy from the North Atlantic to the Asia-Pacific region, but – rather ironically – this is also precisely what has made

China’s role all the more necessary and essential on the climate front. Since becoming fully incorporated into the capitalist world-economy by being admitted to the WTO in

2001, China’s production and consumption of fossil fuels, particularly coal, have skyrocketed, which in turn has propelled China to becoming far and away the greatest emitter of total greenhouse gas emissions over that span of time (though China is still greatly outpaced by developed regions like the US and EU on both per capita and historical emissions). In sheer terms of scale and quantity, China’s fossil fuel consumption are astounding: for example, over the past decade, China consumes about as much coal as the rest of the world combined. The lack of mitigation obligations for

137 Specifically predominantly within the far western region of Xinjiang, China’s largest region by area, and a region whose largest ethnic groups historically have been non-Han Chinese and Muslim (Uighur), and in recent decades have suffered under state programs that encourage Han immigration and exclusionary, anti- Muslim policies, reflecting a form of internal colonization of the Chinese territorial state similar to that in Xinjiang’s southern provincial neighbor, Tibet, which has generated must greater awareness and sympathy in the Western world.

209

China (and other large developing countries, like India, who also have been fueling their development through fossil fuels) was cited as a key reason as to why the US failed to ratify Kyoto, and it was widely recognized in the run-up to Paris that China’s participation was absolutely critical to the ultimate success of the process.

From the very beginning of the UNFCCC negotiations, one of the key demands from the developing world has been a right to development. This was reflected, for example, in the hard-line stance by Brazil and other developing countries to resist ratifying the Framework Convention unless it exempted developing countries from mitigation obligations. In practice, despite being framed as a right to “sustainable development,” this has been expressed as a right to exploit natural resources, specifically fossil fuels. We can still observe this in the development trajectories of China and other large developing world economies, even as they may diversify their energy portfolios.

While some observers, like Minqi Li (and perhaps to a lesser extent, Giovanni Arrighi), are relatively optimistic about the likelihood of something resembling an eco-socialist transition in China, due to the structural necessity of overcoming the social and ecological contradictions of capitalism,138 such a world-ecological revolutionary event is far from a certainty. Rather, if anything, the structural reforms that Xi Jinping and his leadership have installed have only served to deepen and further entrench an authoritarian capitalist mode of production in China, even as it embodies an increasingly hybrid form.

138 Li, an economist who was trained in China and spent two years imprisoned for his radical politics in the wake of repression culminating in the Tiananmen Square massacre, has written extensively on the relations between China, fossil energy, and the capitalist world-system: see, e.g. Li 2009, 2013, 2014, 2017. Arrighi (2007) has practically nothing to say about ecological or climate-related factors in the geo-historical pivot of the capitalist world-system to China, but nevertheless provides a relatively optimistic reading of their ascendancy on the global stage for the prospects of socialism in the 21st Century. 210

In any case, much more work is needed from critical world politics and Marxist ecological perspectives regarding the rise of China that resist the tropes of most Anglo-

American IR realism which “naturalize” the potential for geopolitical conflict and disorder from such a scenario.

4.3.4. Climate Justice Bloc

When considering climate justice as a historical bloc, we must begin with a crucial distinction from the other blocs: relative to the other climate blocs in world politics, climate justice is the closest representation of the ‘subaltern’ movements in global capitalism. Similarly, and for related reasons, in the following chapter, I analyze climate justice as an antisystemic movement against the capitalist nation-state system.

Here however I want to consider climate justice in relation to the other climate blocs previously described.

Among nation-states in the international system, climate justice is not necessarily directly ‘led’ by any, although it can be seen as most closely allied or affiliated with those who are most vulnerable and least responsible for causing the crisis, and who have thus staked out the most ambitious positions in the international negotiations: the Alliance of

Small Island States (AOSIS) and the Least Developed Countries (LDCs). Somewhat ironically, given their lack of material and institutional capacity for sustainable development (relative to more “developed” countries), the most ambitious emissions reductions commitments at a national level have in fact come from AOSIS and LDC members, as announced by a group of LDCs at the COP22 in Marrakech 2016 (where

211

Ethiopia, one of the leading countries among the LDCs, was the largest economy, although its total and per capita emissions rates are still quite low).

It has also been perspectives from the Global South and developing world that have helped put climate justice on the international political agenda, predominantly in the form of calling out the hypocrisies and “injustices” at the heart of global climate politics.

(See Chapter 5 for more details.)

It is also worth highlighting the contradictory roles of subaltern nation-states like

Venezuela and Bolivia as advocates for climate justice in the context of the international negotiations. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, while he was alive, was a consistent critic of the the UNFCCC processes and the role of the US in manipulating the negotiations for their own benefit. Similarly, Bolivian President Evo Morales (and his chief negotiator during the notorious Copenhagen negotiations) were outspoken advocates of the rights and interests of indigenous peoples and their relationship with Pachamama (or Mother Earth).

However, both countries have been beset by contradictions relating to their reliance on extractivist and fossil-based economies (petroleum in Venezuela, natural gas in Bolivia)

(see Bond 2012; Andreucci 2018).

212

Climate Leaders/Core Main Objective Other Features Key Questions Blocs or Priority Green EU (Bonn, Orderly Minimal division Is a capitalist “just Capital Germany – transition to between transition” (GC) Bloc UNFCCC post-fossil ‘neoliberal’ and possible? How Secretariat); economy ‘Keynesian’ compatible with ‘Progressives’ in (“ecological wings, even hegemonic US/developed modernization among civil projects of: DC? world (e.g. and/or “green society FC? America’s capitalism”) organizations Pledge); CAN Fossil ‘Reactionary’ No stranded Rise of Can FC be bought Capital (FC) elements in assets reactionary/anti- off? Is Bloc capitalist core (e.g. ecological nationalization (ie Trump Admin.); populism and sovereign state Fossil fuel NIMBY-ism in authority) industry (e.g. Global South necessary to Exxon Mobil, could facilitate decarbonize Esso); Gulf States; collaboration capitalism and/or Climate denier between fossil global economy? thinktanks and capital and Can it maintain industry fronts developing cohesion? (e.g. Chamber of capital Commerce) Developing China & G-77; Right to Less presence in How compatible is Capital BRICS; State- development ‘civil society’ “right to (DC) Bloc owned relative to other [capitalist] corporations and blocs (most civil development” energy interests society orgs in among DC (e.g. China developing world countries with National closer to green hegemonic Petroleum capitalists or projects of: GC? Corporation) climate justice) FC? Climate LDCs and AOSIS; System Change Tensions and What is Justice (CJ) CJN!/DCJ; Not Climate contradictions as strategically Bloc Cochambama, Change antisystemic necessary to: Bolivia (2010) bloc; Subaltern manage tensions to other three and blocs contradictions? Achieve & realize hegemony?

Table 2: Key features of Climate Blocs in Global Climate Governance

213

4.4. Climate Blocs in Climate Governance

There are a number of features of the global climate regime complex, including but not limited to the UNFCCC, that we can directly attribute to the political relations and processes among the various, competing Climate Blocs. Common But Differentiated

Responsibility (CBDR) is perhaps the bedrock institution of the climate regime, as it has underpinned core features of the regime since the very beginning, including the distinctions and distinct obligations and responsibilities of Annex I and non-Annex I countries. As such, CBDR can be read as the product of hegemonic cooperation among all the major climate blocs.

The protection of fossil fuel interests and exclusion of binding mandates for emissions reductions that would come at the cost of fossil finance interests in the capitalist core are the biggest impact of the FC bloc. Perhaps nowhere else has this been made more clearly or directly than George HW Bush’s famous comment that “The US way of life is not up for negotiation,” at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit where the UNFCCC was negotiated and the US was the only country to object to binding emissions reductions commitments from the outset.

Language regarding rights to development and Loss and Damage can be seen as reflecting the interests of the Developing Capital as well as Climate Justice blocs. We can also identify the impact of the Climate Justice bloc in the (non-binding) language of the

Preamble to the Paris Agreement:

Noting the importance of ensuring the integrity of all ecosystems, including oceans, and the protection of biodiversity, recognized by some cultures as Mother Earth, and noting the importance for some of the

214

concept of “climate justice,” when taking action to address climate change (UNFCCC 2016: 21)

However, the purpose of this analysis is not necessarily to provide additional explanatory value into dynamics political scientists have already observed and explained. Rather, the value added from my framework comes in that it draws attention and consideration to the political effects and implications of dynamics that might otherwise be overlooked. Here I will consider two: the formal (spatial) separation of state and civil society within the

UNFCCC; and the subsumption of the Earth system to capital through the Paris

Agreement.

4.4.1. Formal Separation of State and Civil Society in the UNFCCC

Capitalist climate governance is predicated upon the mediation of the metabolic relations between humans and nature by state and capital. While the forces of “non-state” and “civil society” actors and organizations are determined to have an important and necessary role to play in organizing these relations, ultimately climate governance in capitalism returns to the mediation and reproduction of systemic political relations of state and capital. There are a variety of means of tracing out these relations in capitalist climate politics, but we may trace them out formally and spatially in the separation of state and civil society in the UNFCCC.

It is a defining feature of the formal political institutions of international law in general, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in particular, that only sovereign nation-states may become full subjects in the global climate regime.

That is, only Parties are bound to the legal obligations and responsibilities of the

215 international climate regime. And likewise, generally speaking only Parties have the capability to actually create and enforce legally binding international law. Although non- state actors have increasingly taken it upon themselves to “enforce” international law

(historically this was done by invoking more ‘natural’ conceptions of law/obligation, but increasingly this is becoming more predominant with respect to actually-existing international law), it is recognized that only nation-states have the capabilities to actually create binding legal obligations upon other nation-states, which effectively constitutes the formal nature of international law in general, but the climate regime in particular. As the

UNFCCC notes, only Parties may create law – generally speaking this is recognized to mean that only nation-states that have ratified, and only once the treaty “comes into force” – it is taken for granted that non-state actors are not formally recognized as potential Parties, thus they have qualitatively distinct capacities and relations with the regime, comprised as it is by sovereign nation-states and the organizational apparatuses

(e.g. the Secretariat).

The way that civil society has been ‘included’ in the process has been through the production of the civil society observer organization category. (See discussion in Chapter

5 below.) This is the manifestation of the “formal” integration of civil society into the international climate governance regime. However, note how this ‘inclusion’ of civil society within the formal political structures of the international climate regime is itself predicated upon a prior unity of state and civil society, insofar as these civil society subjects are still subject to the binding legal and political authority of their respective nation-states. That is, prior to the inclusion and recognition of these ‘independent’

216 political organizations and institutions, they must have a prior recognition of being subject to the authority of their respective territorial nation-states, which is in turn channeled through the international regime. Prior to their formal inclusion within the international regime, it is taken-for-granted that the respective nation-state Party is responsible for the representation of its sovereign interests. Thus, the formal inclusion of civil society at the international regime is itself predicated upon the prior unity of state and civil society at the territorial nation-state

These relations may also be traced spatially, through the increasingly formalized segregation of state and civil society spaces within the UNFCCC and COP spaces. Two key turning points for this process can be identified at COP15 in Copenhagen and then at

COP21 in Paris.

One potential critical implication of this feature of the capitalist climate governance regime is that the increased formalization and, indeed, ‘inclusion’ and

‘participation’ of civil society organizations and actors within the global climate regime, can (and arguably must) be read as part of a broader process of the transnationalization of the capitalist integral state. This thus provides a necessary means of comprehending how and why non-state actors and organizations, such as those associated with the global movement for climate justice, actively resist and refuse to participate in the international climate governance regime, insofar as this can be read as a coherent anti-state (anarchist) political praxis. Formal inclusion and participation in the climate regime is not a politically innocent praxis any more than it is when nation-states choose to withdraw (as in Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement). It can further

217 give a more precise and clear means of distinguishing the more ‘systemic’ and

‘antisystemic’ movements of climate governance and climate justice in the international system.

4.4.2. Subsumption of the Earth System to Capital in the Paris Agreement and IPCC

In Marx’s framework, subsumption refers to the process by which production processes in general (labor, or the regulation of the metabolic relations between humans and nature) become incorporated and ultimately transformed by the capitalist mode of production. In an appendix to Capital, Marx distinguishes between “formal” and “real” subsumption: formal subsumption refers to process by which capital intervenes in existing processes of production, “the takeover by capital of a mode of labor developed before the emergence of capitalist relations” (Marx 1976[1863]: 1021). Formal subsumption does not qualitatively transform the productive process, but rather “takes over the labor process as it finds it,” and introduces quantitative changes to the production process in the pursuit of surplus value: “The work may become more intensive, its duration may be extended, it may become more continuous or orderly under the eye of the interested capitalist, but… these changes do not affect the character of the actual labor process, the actual mode of working” (ibid).

By contrast, the process of real subsumption involves qualitative transformations in the production process itself, reorganizing the labor process (regulation of the social metabolism) towards the pursuit of ephemeral relative surplus value:

218

…the productive forces of directly social, socialized (ie collective) labor come into being through co-operation, division of labor within the workshop, the use of machinery, and in general the transformation of production by the conscious use of the sciences, of mechanics, chemistry, etc. for specific ends… The entire development of the productive forces of socialized labor… together with it the use of science (the general product of social development), in the immediate process of production, takes the form of the productive power of capital (Marx 1976[1863]: 1024)

The shift from formal to real subsumption of the metabolic processes to capital represents the moment at which “a specifically capitalist form of production comes into being”

(ibid). The distinction between formal and real subsumption turns on the source of the production of surplus value to capital: “If the production of absolute surplus-value was the material expression of the formal subsumption of labor under capital, then the production of relative surplus-value may be viewed as its real subsumption” (Marx

1976[1863]: 1025). However, the former is a condition of the latter, as the production of

“absolute surplus-value always precedes relative” (ibid).

In the context of the climate governance apparatuses, we can identify emergent processes of formal and real subsumption of the Earth system. The relevant article of the

Paris Agreement where we can find this is Article 6, which deals primarily with mitigation. Mechanisms for carbon offsetting and markets for exchanging carbon equivalents as a form of climate rent have been a key feature of the climate regime apparatus since at least Kyoto (Felli 2014), and as such, the Paris Agreement can be read as part of the expansion and development of this tendency. The difference is that Paris opens up the process of subsumption to the Earth system as a whole. This is reflected in the mechanism of the Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes (ITMOs), whereby any and all countries may “on a voluntary basis in cooperative approaches” 219 invest in other countries to obtain emissions reductions that count for the investor country. That is, investments in carbon offsetting, ie the production of carbon equivalences, a form of “abstract social nature”139 that can be quantified and valued, have become a primary means by which the mitigation goals expressed in Article 2 (“Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre- industrial levels” [UNFCCC 2016: 22]) can be achieved.

This becomes more explicit in the context of the IPCC SR-15 2018 report, which was produced as a direct response to the call in the Paris Agreement for the IPCC to review their goals. The IPCC, reflecting the latest climate science, acknowledges: “All pathways that limit global warming to 1.5 °C with limited or no overshoot project the use of carbon dioxide removal (CDR)” (C3). That is, the expansion of technologies to offset greenhouse gas emissions produced through fossil fuel consumption, mediated by scientific processes of equivalence and valorized through exchange, are being produced as necessary political means of intervening in the Earth natural systemic processes.

Existing attempts to manage or regulate these metabolic processes (ie the production and consumption of fossil fuels) through the interventions of state and capital can be read as part of the process of formal subsumption, insofar as state and capital are intervening in processes already defined prior or independently of the specifically capitalist mode of production. However, with the financialization of carbon offsetting and formal

139 “Abstract social nature names the family of processes through which states and capitalists map, identify, quantify, measure, and code human and extra-human natures in service of capital accumulation” (Moore 2015: 194). 220 mechanisms to incentivize production and exchange of these equivalences, we can begin to identify a shift in which there is a qualitatively distinct mode of intervening in the social metabolism of the Earth system. Labor is now being oriented towards the regulation of the Earth’s carbon system as a whole, which is now in the process of becoming subsumed within the circuits of capitalist production and exchange. The sources of capitalist value are not merely being rendered through the production of fossil energy, but the production and exchange of carbon itself. Thus, rather than curbing or mitigating capital’s inner drive towards the endless appropropriation and exploitation of nature, Article 6 of the Paris Agreement is a means of further entrenching and facilitating this process.140

4.5. Conclusion: Climate Governance as the Planetarization of the Capitalist Nation-State System

At the outset of this chapter, I defined climate governance as the systemic movement of the capitalist crisis of climate change. In and of itself, this is something of a tautology, insofar as the nature of governance is that it reproduces the systemic order of which it is predicated upon. Much like sovereignty represents an end-in-itself, so too does governance presume as its own end the reproduction of the systemic order of relations that gives it form in the first place.

140 Surprise 2016 also deals with the matters of real and formal subsumption of the Earth’s biosphere in the processes and relations of capitalist climate change geopolitics, though his analysis focuses predominantly on geoengineering of solar radiation management (SRM). 221

However, the implications of this conceptualization of climate governance become clearer when we evaluate them in the context of the capitalist system whose order is presumed by the operation of governance, and the nature of the climate crisis which origins lie in the ecological contradictions of the capitalist system that has tasked itself with governing the crisis. That is, climate governance under capitalism is predicated upon the reproduction of the systemic relations that have generated the crisis in the first place. We can identify this in at least two forms in which climate governance has manifested itself: the formal, material, and spatial separation of state and civil society within the UNFCCC system, ie the ‘statification’ of global climate politics; and the ongoing processes by which the Earth’s carbon system are being subsumed by capitalism and its state system. More work is needed to trace out the specific tendencies, directions, and effects that hegemonic struggles among the leading Climate Blocs (Green Capitalist,

Fossil Capitalist, Developing Capitalist, and Climate Justice) have had in shaping the precise forms that these politics of climate governance are taking.

However, the hegemony of capitalism’s mode of organizing relations within nature are manifest in the general and specific tendencies of climate governance we observe at a global scale. While we have yet to see the full consolidation and realization of sovereign planetary authority (ie a capitalist world-state), we can nevertheless identify this uneven and contradictory expansion of modes, processes, and apparatuses of climate governance as part of a broader process of the “transnationalization” of the capitalist

(integral) state, the expansion of an integral capitalist nation-state system at a global scale. The fact that the Gramscian framework of hegemony and the integral state enables

222 us to understand how both “state” and “civil society” can both comprise moments or regions of the capitalist integral state system thus helps us better understand how and why climate justice movement actors would target fellow “civil society” actors, like the

America’s Pledge coalition, when we might otherwise consider these two sets of actors as on the same side of wanting more and better solutions to climate change: as part of the broader systemic movement of the capitalist climate governance apparatus, the America’s

Pledge coalition (and its allies within the broader Green Capitalist climate bloc) can themselves be seen as an extension of this expanding capitalist integral state system.

In fact, particularly in the context of the subsumption of the Earth system to the capitalist mode of production and the corresponding means of managing it, what we are observing is not merely the ‘globalization’ of capitalism and its state system, but its planetarization, as the Earth itself is becoming an object of capitalist accumulation and regulation. While climate governance represents the systemic form of planetary politics under capitalism, in the next chapter I consider and evaluate climate justice as its antisystemic movement and planetary ecological alternative.

223

Chapter 5. Ecology, Hegemony, and the Struggle for Climate Justice: Political Praxis of the Climate Justice Movement

“System Change, Not Climate Change” “Capitalism is Not Compatible with Climate Justice” – Banner slogans of the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice (DCJ)

“We are unstoppable, another world is possible!” “Burn borders, not coal!” – Chanted slogans of Ende Gelände (Red Finger)

5.1. Introduction

What defines the politics of climate justice? What different strategic and tactical considerations do activists and organizations who associate with the global movement for climate justice make as they work within, alongside, and against the institutional and state structures of global climate politics? How, in other words, do the “theory” and the

“praxis” of climate justice coincide? In this chapter, I take up these questions with consideration on the basis of field research conducted alongside movement actors and organizations associated with the climate justice movement (CJM), including at and around the annual Conference of the Parties (COP) international climate change negotiations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

(UNFCCC). I argue that in order to adequately conceptualize the climate justice movement and their politics, we must understand climate justice as an antisystemic

224 movement against the crisis of the capitalist nation-state system, and as part of the struggle for ecological hegemony over the social metabolism of the Earth system.

At a rooftop café on a Friday night during the COP22 climate negotiations in

Marrakech, Morocco, an international group of activists and organizers gather to discuss plans and strategy for the weekend’s events.141 The city is hosting the annual global conference, the first COP of the post-Paris climate regime. For the previous week, activists and organizers have been busy coordinating events and actions in and around the conference site. Central to the evening’s agenda is what to do on this upcoming Sunday, the date scheduled for the upcoming climate justice march, which this year is being organized by the Moroccan Coalition for Climate Justice (MCCJ). However, nobody from MCCJ is represented at the table. Instead, the meeting has been called by representatives of REDACOP, the Reseau democratique pour l’accompagnement de la

COP22 (“Democratic Network for the Accompaniment of the COP22” in English), a local network of dissident activists and organizers who split off from the MCCJ shortly after its formation at the beginning of the year (ATTAC/CADTM Maroc 2016a). At the table with the Moroccans and North Africans from REDACOP are a variety of activists and conference participants from all over the world, including representatives from international organizations 350.org and Friends of the Earth the US-based youth organization SustainUS.

The central issues on the night’s agenda are whether and how the international climate justice activists and organizations in attendance can and should support the

141 I was a witness to the following events as a participant-observer in November 2016. 225

RECACOP coalition’s call for a boycott of Sunday’s “official” climate justice march, and, instead, help organize and participate in an alternative, counter-march against the official demonstration. At the heart of the matter, according to the local activists and organizers, is the corruption and collusion at the heart of the COP22: the MCCJ is an artifact of the Moroccan government, whose leadership and organizational structure has not been merely co-opted but defined by political and economic elites with close times to the regime of King Mohammed VI. As such, the MCCJ and this weekend’s march form parts of a broader campaign, organized by the Moroccan state in conjunction with other key political and economic actors, towards greenwashing the Moroccan state and the role of European capital in extractive and neo-imperialist policies in the region. Hosting the

COP, in other words, provides a valuable opportunity for the Moroccan regime to boost its credentials as a key market for foreign capital investment, as well as to leverage foreign and domestic political support at a time when many governments in the region are facing crises of democratic accountability, legitimacy, and internal cohesion. Hosting and publicizing the officially designated climate justice march, an event that has become something of a tradition at the annual COPs, therefore provides a unique opportunity for the Moroccan state to showcase its ‘progress’ on the environmental front, but also its

‘democratic’ character. From the standpoint of the REDACOP coalition, itself formed out of a collection of activists and dissident organizers with years of previous experience organizing on social and environmental justice, this means endorsing or participating in the officially designated march is to be complicit in the legitimization of what is, in fact, a profoundly anti-democratic and anti-ecological political regime and its neo-colonial

226 policies of exploitation and extraction. Much better, they argue, to boycott the official events, and to support an alternative counter-march (one unsanctioned by the authorities), one that criticizes the state-based plundering of the climate and nature at the heart of the

UNFCCC system, and calls for a truly revolutionary, and emancipatory, climate politics.142

The international activists and organizers present that night were therefore faced with a dilemma: How to effectively support local calls for solidarity and social and environmental justice without jeopardizing the efficacy, cohesion, and coordination of the climate justice movement and its messaging as a whole? While there was a clear consensus at the table that what the Moroccan government was doing was obviously quite bad and contrary to the ends of climate justice, a number of activists also expressed reservations about the call for a boycott and organization of an alternative march could in fact accomplish. First of all, there were immediate, practical questions to consider: few attending the COP and Sunday’s march on Sunday (and even fewer potential observers, including international media) are simply enough up to the same speed on contemporary political dynamics in Morocco and North Africa. It is hard enough to raise awareness of the complexities and demands of climate justice even when the negotiations are seen as historically significant, as they were the previous year in Paris, but this year is a more

“technical” COP and it is being held in a Global South country, thus it is mostly off the radar for those outside the climate change or international politics community. Also

142 For more on the REDACOP coalition and its split from the MCCJ and its criticisms of the COP22 in Morocco, see ATTAC/CADTM 2016a, 2016b, 2016c; see also Democracy Now! 2016 for coverage of their protests at the COP22. 227 complicating matters are the recent news regarding the election of Donald Trump to the

Presidency of the United States, an event which is already having radical implications for the climate justice community. Thus, for the international climate justice activists in attendance, communicating clearly why the local activists are protesting, and why that matters from the standpoint of a global or international climate movement is a rather complicated matter, especially given the limited amount of time and resources available.

Hence, there were practical concerns as to whether or not support for REDACOP’s critique might actually be better expressed within the context of the official march, as opposed to organizing a boycott or alternative march that could be repressed, ignored, or both.

But these more immediate tactical questions about whether and how to take particular actions in the course of just a few days are themselves linked into a broader strategic question: To what extent must the climate justice movement reconsider their support and participation in the politics of the COP and the UNFCCC altogether? In other words, if participating in the official march makes an individual or the organization they represent complicit with the injustices at the heart of contemporary climate politics, then why stop at boycotting the march altogether? Why not boycott the entire process?

Indeed, this was the standpoint of the REDACOP leadership: several of them noted that they refused to take part in or attend any of the side events directly related to the COP22, and instead the coalition organized a series of counter-events, including the march as well as a counter-conference and field trip to Safi, an environmentally-degraded port city the

228

REDACOP organizers argued was emblematic of the ecological contradictions at the heart of the COP and the Moroccan regime.143

For at least one organizer and representative of an international climate justice organization at the table, to boycott the climate march would, at best, risk sending a mixed message, thus undermining the potential for a more coherent, and thus effective message to the international community; at worst, however, taking this sort of action could risk the further dissolution of the climate movement as a whole. Indeed, for many of the activists and organizers at the table, this question of unity and division within the climate movement was a familiar one: this was not the first COP where questions of legitimization and complicity in ongoing injustices were a key feature of internal debates within the movement. Indeed, one of the great successes attributed to the COP21 in

Paris was the relative cohesion and coordination between activists and organizations in the climate movement; to call for a boycott of the official march, let alone the official negotiations, could potentially risk the further fracturing of the climate movement, thereby not just undermining the movement as a whole, but even potentially the entire process of the negotiations. For many individuals and organizations in the climate movement, even as much as what happens in a local context may be emblematic of, and in some ways directly related to the broader structural injustices of the system as a whole, the stakes go beyond what can or might be achieved in any particular local context.

Perhaps therefore the more strategic route is actually to work within the system and its

143 For more on the ecological contradictions of the COP22 and the Moroccan regime, see Hamouchene 2016a, 2016b; Haynes 2016. 229 political processes, warts and all, to struggle for greater awareness and action on the fundamental issues that we can all agree upon, rather than risk jeopardizing the unity and coherence of the movement, and potentially even the entire political process, as a whole.

I cite this anecdote from my experience as a participant-observer in global climate politics to highlight a central tension and problematique at the heart of the climate movement and this paper: How are we to understand the divergent sets of strategies and tactics expressed by different actors in the global movement for climate justice? How, in other words, to define the politics of climate justice? The question is an essential one, both for understanding the internal divisions and characteristics of the various actors and organizations who can claim to be identified with the “climate justice movement,” as well as for our very understanding of “climate justice” as a goal or priority for actors in global climate politics. As our anecdote illustrates, it is not simply a question of being “for” or

“against” climate justice; rather, even when there may be significant agreement about what climate justice is or should be, as well as its desirability as a political objective, there are frequently significant divisions regarding what is necessary or desirable to achieve to such a goal, and indeed, certain strategies and tactics may find themselves at odds with one another, as was the case that night in Marrakech.

My approach draws upon the Marxist ecological perspective developed in previous chapters, deploying my conception of ecological hegemony to develop a framework for analyzing the politics of the climate justice movement.144 I show how

144 For more on Gramsci, see Gramsci 1971, 1999, 2000. For more on Gramsci and political theory, in particular the central role that the concept of hegemony plays for his theory of the political, see Thomas 2009a, 2009b. For more on Poulantzas and his conception of the state and its relation to Marxist analysis of politics, see Poulantzas 2008, 2014. For more on Marxist state theory, see Jessop 1990, 2015. For more 230 different stances on strategies and tactics in the politics of climate change and climate justice reflect not just different orientations or goals that are sought, but that they in fact help define the very contours of climate justice as an antisystemic movement against the capitalist climate crisis. This analysis has important implications for not only how we understand the relations of the climate justice movement with the capitalist nation-state system and its politics of climate governance, but also for how we conceptualize the political praxis necessary for resolving the crisis. In particular, I show how ecological direct action plays a central role in the struggle for “system change not climate change,” and an alternative, ecological hegemony.

Non-state actors, as part of an emergent global civil society, are increasingly significant in global climate politics (Andonova and Mitchell 2010; Schroeder and Lovell

2012; Hadden 2015; Hale 2016; Kuyper and Bäckstrand 2016; Rietig 2016; Allan and

Hadden 2017; Bäckstrand et al 2017). This matters both in terms of the sheer numbers and presence of these civil society actors in global climate forums like the United Nations

Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the need for their participation to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement (UNFCCC 2016). Thus political leaders and academics alike are increasingly aware of the significance of this emergent

on the capitalist nation-state system, see Karatani 2008, 2014. For an overview of the variety of approaches to Marxist ecology, see, e.g.: Benton, ed 1996; Foster 2000; Moore 2015; Moore, ed 2016; Saito 2017. Critical human geographers in particular have had much to contribute to this tradition: see, e.g. Smith 2008[1984]. For more on the relationship between Gramscian political theory and political ecology, including perspectives from critical human geography, see: Mann 2009; Ekers and Loftus 2012; Ekers et al, eds 2013. For a ‘neo-Poulantzian’ perspective on the internationalization of the state and environmental politics, see Brand, Görg, and Wissen 2011. (Neo-Gramscian perspectives in IR will be discussed as part of a literature review.) For a project whose approach also combines Marxist political economic and ecological theories with analysis of the geo-politics of climate change and climate justice, from a critical human geography perspective, see Mann and Wainwright 2018. 231 global climate movement in international relations (Deitz and Garrelts, eds 2014;

Cassegård et al, eds 2017).

However, as the contentious politics surrounding the annual Conferences of the

Parties (COPs) show, a multiplicity of voices, perspectives, and interests vie among this global civil society. Many of these groups are struggling to be recognized and to participate in these global political spaces. And fundamental disagreements and differences exist among these groups, including such basics as the nature of climate change and the necessary solutions.

This increasing politicization within global civil society and the increasingly confrontational approach that many movement actors are taking towards the institutional political structures of the capitalist nation-state system, mean that we can no longer speak of “civil society” or the “climate movement” in international climate politics in the singular. Despite the prevalence of relational approaches in international relations (IR) to the study of social movements (e.g. Keck and Sikkink 1998; Hadden 2015), there is a tendency to treat the climate movement as if it were a stable and coherent object rather than unsteady and diverse set of subjects whose boundaries and identities are constantly in question and under negotiation.

Thus, the so-called climate justice movement: “climate justice” is not merely a discursive frame nor just a set of norms or ideals that are intended to guide or shape political action or reform. Rather, the movement for climate justice is itself produced in and through the politics of cooperation and contention that dialectically shapes the actors, organizations, and struggles that claim the name. The antisystemic nature of climate

232 justice movements (CJMs) is represented in the popular climate justice slogan “system change not climate change” (Bullard and Müller 2012). These movements do not simply seek more just means for mitigating and adapting to climate change, distributing environmental vulnerability, or compensating for the transition to a post-fossil economy: they are situated against a capitalist system that is responsible for causing the crisis and tasks itself with resolving it.

However, like all antisystemic movements (Arrighi et al 2014[1989]), climate justice confronts a strategic dilemma: how to relate to the system that the movement resists and seeks to ultimately overcome?145 How can climate justice participate in the global governance structures and institutions of the system without reproducing its structural contradictions? I argue the antisystemic politics of climate justice requires attention to the role of hegemony in organizing relations between humans and nature at a planetary scale. This dialectical and historicist approach attends to the ways political relations are structured by struggles for leadership by competing historical blocs in a given social formation. I conceptualize climate justice as an antisystemic movement and struggle for an alternative hegemony at a planetary scale. Drawing upon fieldwork conducted as a participant-observer at the COP23 in Bonn, I show how direct action reflects the climate justice movement’s antisystemic demand for “system change, not climate change.” The CJM participates in the UNFCCC and uses the COPs as sites to

145 See Valdez (2019) for an account of the antisystemic transnational solidarity networks of the anticolonial movement that resisted racialized capitalist colonialism and oppression. 233 organize resistance to the business-as-usual that defines contemporary climate politics, but it also works with(in) the system to enable the conditions of its own possibility.

This chapter also addresses a puzzle highlighted by IR scholars regarding a so- called “democracy-civil society paradox” in global environmental governance (Bernauer et al 2013). In short, these scholars highlight a tension between democratic participation and civil society inclusion in international politics, including that of the UNFCCC. In the words of Fisher (2010), increased inclusion and participation, including contentious politics by climate justice activists, risks “leaving civil society out in the cold” with politically counter-productive effects (see also Hadden 2015: 171). However, my research demonstrates that climate justice movement actors are aware of these tensions and choose to play with these insider-outsider dynamics deliberately, which I argue are coherent within a broader framework of climate justice tactics and strategies as antisystemic political praxis.

I provide an overview of climate justice as an antisystemic movement by showing how the CJM has developed out of struggles beyond the UNFCCC, including through localized movements against environmental injustices and struggles against global capitalism. These antisystemic dimensions of the movement have been undertheorized with respect to the relations between climate justice and the capitalist nation-state system.

For this I then turn to the theoretical resources offered to us from Gramscian perspectives on hegemony. Next, I turn to my case study of climate justice politics in and around the

COP23 climate negotiations. I profile three important climate justice organizations active in Bonn (the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice [DCJ], the Beyond Gas

234 network, and Ende Gelände) and analyze the forms of their political praxis using my

Gramscian framework. I conclude by highlighting some implications for our thinking about state and civil society relations in global ecological politics.

5.2. Climate Justice as Antisystemic Movement

Among contemporary analyses of climate movement politics, Jennifer Hadden’s work (2015) is a notable example of a leading approach that applies an innovative synthesis of network analysis with social constructivist and contentious politics theories to examine the increasingly contentious dynamics of climate justice politics among civil society actors surrounding the 2009 COP15 in Copenhagen. Like Keck and Sikkink

(1998), Hadden’s primary units of analysis are transnational activist networks (TANs) in global climate politics, specifically the Climate Action Network (CAN) and two climate justice networks that emerged in the 2000s, Climate Justice Now! (CJN) and Climate

Justice Action (CJA). Hadden traces out the increasingly contentious dynamics within the climate movement, ultimately leading to the split in civil society between CAN and CJN.

Although Hadden centers her analysis around CAN, the leading transnational activist network in global climate politics, TANs are distinct from movements, which are not reducible to the organizations or individuals that make them up. Movements are open-ended, pluralistic assemblages comprised not only of activists and organizations, but also the discourses, ideas, and values as well as political practices, strategies, and techniques that also constitute them (Wolford 2010; Russell, Pusey, and Chatterton 2011;

Barker et al, eds 2013). We can trace this conception of movements to Marx and Engels’s

235 conception of the “existing class struggle” as the “historical movement” against capitalism (2010[1848]). Movements are parts of larger, historical dialectics, insofar as constitute themselves within and in relation to the broader systems and historical processes of which they are a part. We saw this in the previous chapter, as climate governance represents the systemic movement of the capitalist nation-state system’s management of the climate crisis.

However, the “climate justice movement,” as a completely unified or singular political object does not exist, just as there is no singular conception or definition of

“climate justice.”146 At most, what we call the climate justice movement is a “movement of many movements”147 across multiple scales. As Wolford (2015) reminds us, movements are open systems with processes of mobilization and mediation between leaders and led. Processes and struggles for hegemony therefore occur within movements, as historical blocs (Gramsci 1971). There are thus struggles and contestation within movements over how climate justice is represented and who gets to speak on its behalf.

Thus, this global movement of movements is both more and less than what is captured by the signifier “climate justice.” Consider Patrick Bond’s (2012) discussion of

Mary Robinson and her Foundation for Climate Justice. Founded by the former Irish

President in 2011, the Mary Robinson Foundation for Climate Justice are well-known advocates for market-based solutions to climate change problems, such as emissions

146 Political theorist David Schlosberg is a notable proponent of a “pluralist” approach to environmental and climate justice. See Schlosberg (2007) and Schlosberg and Collins (2014). 147 The concept “movement of many movements” comes from the Alter-globalization or Global Justice movement at the turn of the 21st Century (e.g. Mertes, ed 2004). 236 trading and offset mechanisms, as part of a broader approach that advocates economic growth as a necessary means for addressing climate change.148 Robinson’s Foundation represents what Bond calls “global elite climate management” (2012: 77). This approach is fundamentally at odds with climate justice perspectives that have developed out of grassroots movements and subaltern struggles against growth-based development projects, emissions trading and offsetting projects. Hence when analyzing the politics of climate justice, we must distinguish which conception of climate justice we are working with, given that multiple, and at times opposing or competing, claims on behalf of climate justice are being made.

On the other hand, we must also consider the fact that not all movements or struggles relevant for or related to climate justice may explicitly invoke or acknowledge the term. Martinez-Alier et al (2016) and those working with the Atlas of Environmental

Justice (EJAtlas) make this point with respect to the global environmental justice movement. What we call a “global environmental justice movement” is not actually a singular or unitary movement, but rather a plurality of struggles, not all of which explicitly invoke claims or demands for “justice.” Instead, the movements and struggles are informed by their own local conditions, including the ideological frameworks that activists and observers use to make sense of these struggles and their demands. This has

148 The Foundation advocates “climate justice principles” including “support the right to development” and “use effective partnerships to secure climate justice” (Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Justice N.D.). While perhaps admirable in the abstract, a “right to development” is often asserted to justify fossil- intensive development, such as coal-fired power plants. Among the “effective partnerships” advocated are with “corporate interests” whose private financial objectives are fundamentally opposed to climate justice principles based on degrowth (e.g. Martinez-Alier 2012).

237 led to a proliferation of social and environmental resistance movements and campaigns across a variety of issue areas, informed by an equally diverse set of perspectives and values. These include concepts and frameworks that have developed directly or explicitly in relation to Western conceptions of “environmental justice,” including the original movements against environmental injustices such as environmental racism or ecological debt that were first developed in the Western Hemisphere in the latter half of the 20th Century. But it also includes other subaltern movements throughout the world, such as food sovereignty, environmentalism of the poor, and buen vivir (sumak kawsay), that ground themselves in their local contexts and indigenous traditions (Martinez-Alier et al 2014; Martinez-Alier et al 2016).

But just as it would be a mistake to erase the plurality of forms that these struggles take, it would equally be an error to assume that they are entirely separated or distinct from one another. Instead, what unites them as a “global” movement of movements is precisely the fact that the social and economic forces that have generated the multiples crises they are responding to are themselves equally global in scope. As

Martinez-Alier et al put it, “the changing social metabolism of industrial economies

(including the excessive production of carbon dioxide) gives rise to increasing numbers of ecological distribution conflicts that sometimes overlap with other social related to class, ethnicity, or indigenous identity, gender or caste which may be further related to institutional configurations such as property regimes or territorial rights” (2016: 1-2).

238

And as we have seen in the prior discussion, climate change is a crisis of capitalism that is not merely “global” but “planetary” in scope, which adds an additional, ecological dimension to the nature of the movement’s politics.149

What does it mean then to say that climate justice is an antisystemic movement?

According to Arrighi, Hopkins, and Wallerstein,

The concept of antisystemic movements… presumes an analytic perspective about a system… referred to here [as] the world-system of historical capitalism… We are in search of the system-wide structural processes which have produced certain kinds of movements and which simultaneously formed the constraints within which such movements have operated. (2014[1989], 1)

To understand climate justice as an “antisystemic movement” then is to consider climate justice in relation to the “system” of historical capitalism which this movement is

“against” and to put the movement in relation to the planetary ecological crisis of capitalism, for which “climate justice” is the proposed (re)solution.

Garrelts and Dietz (2014: 2) note that “[d]emands for climate justice are central for one section of the climate movement which identifies capitalist structures as the cause of climate change and diagnoses a deep-reaching crisis of the current political and economic system.” Climate justice is thus represented as the “radical” wing of the

“climate movement.” The broader movement is comprised not just of explicitly anticapitalist (climate justice) organizations like Rising Tide or Via Campesina, but actors “committed to a paradigm of ecological modernization according to which

149 The “planetary” dimension of the climate crisis is evident in the discourse around the “Anthropocene,” the so-called “Age of Man” defined by human-derived impacts on the Earth. For an overview on the specific role that capitalism has played in the planetary crisis and debates around these concepts, see e.g. Vansintjan 2015; Angus 2016; Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016; Moore, ed. 2017; Kunkel 2017. 239 environmental problems can be resolved politically, economically, and technologically within the context of real existing institutions and power structures” such as 350.org or

Friends of the Earth (Garrelts and Dietz 2014: 2-3).

To better understand the relation of the ‘antisystemic’ movements for climate justice movement to the ‘systemic movements’ of the UNFCCC and capitalist nation- state system, it is worth considering the status of so-called ‘civil society observer organizations’ within the Framework Convention. This in turn will help shape our understanding of the relationship between what we call the “climate justice movement” and the broader “climate movement,” including the Climate Action Network (CAN).150

In the earliest days of the UNFCCC, during the negotiations leading up to and concluding with the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 where the UNFCCC was established, the need to represent the interests of civil society above and beyond their formal incorporation through their respective Party member states was recognized. As an intergovernmental organization based on international law, only Parties to the

Convention can participate issue and ratify legal agreements within the context of the

UNFCCC, but only nation-states can be recognized as Parties. However, it was also recognized that voices and perspectives of organizations and movements that were formally independent of their respective nation-states, so-called non-state actors, ought to be included, especially as these non-governmental organizations represented communities and interest groups (what the UNFCCC refers to as “stakeholders”) whose

150 While this distinction between the “radicals” and the “mainstream” is a common one in social movement analysis, below I argue for a conception of “antisystemic” and “systemic” movement politics that can better conceptualize the relationship between movement resistance, global governance, and state- civil society relations in capitalism. 240 perspectives were considered necessary for complementing the ‘national interests’ of their respective nation-states. It was determined the way to do this was through the creation of NGO constituencies, each of which would have formal representatives known as “focal points” (UNFCCC 2011).151

Originally, there were only two constituencies within the UNFCCC: business and industry organizations (BINGO) and environmental non-governmental organizations

(ENGO). Over time, the constituencies expanded as more and more organizations and perspectives became represented within the UNFCCC. For example, indigenous peoples organizations (IPO) became a formally recognized constituency at COP 7 in 2001, while

Research and Independent Organizations (RINGO) – which is, among most academics who study climate policy, the most likely means of gaining access to the UNFCCC – was not established until 2003 at COP 9. Today there are 9 constituencies of observer organizations to the UNFCCC: In addition to BINGO, ENGO, IPO, and ENGO, there are local government and municipal authorities (LGMA), trade union non-governmental organizations (TUNGO), farmers and agricultural NGOs (Farmers), women and gender

NGOs (Women and Gender), and youth NGOs (YOUNGO) (UNFCCC 2011).152

The history of the Climate Action Network (CAN) illustrates the systemic

“climate movement.” For most of the early history of the UNFCCC, CAN could claim a practical monopoly on formally representing the interests of civil society in international

151 The UNFCCC itself acknowledges that “Without the cooperation of the ‘constituency’ focal points, it would not be possible for the secretariat to maintain effective interaction with interested stakeholders” (UNFCCC 2011). 152 Even though these constituency groups and organizations are considered “non-governmental” or “non- state actors,” government/state actors are represented via the LGMA constituency, which complicates traditional thinking about international relations predicated upon a strict state/civil society divide. 241 climate negotiations (Hadden 2015). CAN’s origins can be traced to the prehistory of the

UNFCCC, as many of the same organizations that participated in the formation of climate regime were also involved in the formation of the IPCC and other international fora where climate change was an object of scientific, and later, political concern. CAN’s composition in those early years reflected that of the organizations most active around climate change at the time: primarily scientific and technocratic organizations whose membership and leadership consisted primarily of (predominantly white, male) “experts” educated and/or based in the wealthy, industrialized countries of the core of the capitalist world-system (Allan 2017).

This technocratic framing and approach to the problem by CAN throughout the first decade of the climate regime, while reflecting in large measure the standpoints of the

ENGOs that comprised the then-burgeoning civil society network, contrasted with important perspectives from the “developing world” (ie the periphery and semi-periphery of the capitalist world-system). For many actors from the Global South, the politicization of climate change was intrinsic to the nature of the problem and evident from the earliest days of the regime, particularly in the form of the conflicts over binding emissions reductions commitments and mitigation responsibilities between “developed” and

“developing” countries, formally represented in the distinction between Annex I and non-

Annex I countries in the UNFCCC (UN 1992). An influential booklet published in 1991 by two scholar-activists from India, Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain, began by stating

“The idea that developing countries like India and China must share the blame for heating up the earth and destabilizing its climate… is an excellent example of environmental

242 colonialism” (Agarwal and Narain 1991, 1). Produced in response to a World Resources

Institute report that called for binding mitigation targets for both developed and developing countries (and in effect reflecting the position of US negotiators in the

UNFCCC),153 Agarwal and Narain decried the profoundly uneven distributions of responsibility, capacity, and vulnerability with respect to global warming, arguing that equity in the distribution of action and responsibility ought to be a central requirement for a climate regime as a matter of fairness. Thus, the profound inequalities at the heart of climate politics have formed the basis of a conception of climate injustice that has been present and has defined global climate politics from the beginning, even if it has taken different forms at different times.

By the turn of the century, at least three major dynamics contributed to the politicization of climate change within civil society that strained CAN’s cohesion. First, as more organizations and constituencies began to participate and become recognized within the UNFCCC, CAN began to incorporate a much broader set of interests and perspectives. This included many historically marginalized and climate-vulnerable groups (“frontline communities”) from the peripheries of the world-system. At the same time, the increasing salience of climate change as a political issue among activists and organizations in the so-called “global justice” or “alter-globalization” movements meant that their social programs began to integrate environmental dimensions into their political platforms. Together these groups, including frontline communities from the Global South and solidarity movements from the Global North, resisted many of the core features of

153 WRI is a member of CAN. 243 the Kyoto regime promoted by Western NGOs and political elites, including so-called

“flexibility mechanisms” like greenhouse gas offsetting, carbon trading, and the

Reducing Emissions Through Deforestation and Development (REDD and later REDD+) programs. These policies were rejected as “false solutions” because they were predicted to fail to actually mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and they would have additional pernicious effects by effectively displacing mitigation burdens from developed countries onto developing countries. The policies also threaten to literally displace poor and vulnerable communities subject to land grabs under the guise of carbon mitigation. The repeated failures to achieve a comprehensive and effective climate treaty, first in Rio and later with the collapse of the Kyoto framework, only served to increase the tensions within the CAN coalition, given that many of the dissident organizations felt that they were being ‘sold out’ for a climate treaty that would ultimately fail anyway.

In many histories of the climate justice movement, the decisive moment came at the Bali COP in 2007 when a collection of dissident civil society organizations gathered and declared independence from the Climate Action Network (e.g. Hadden 2015). Under the title of Climate Justice Now! (CJN), this network adopted a set of core principles (the

Bali Climate Justice principles) and advocated for a more ambitious and confrontational stance against capitalism than what could ever hope to be achieved within CAN. CJN became a registered civil society organization within the ENGO constituency for COP15, where they now constituted a second major network organization in the climate negotiations in Copenhagen 2009. There, this “split” in civil society came to a head as

244 numerous climate justice observers and activists were targeted by the Danish police. 154

The climate justice movement was in disarray.

Things were different in 2016. For many observers, among the biggest achievements of Paris was the cooperation and collaboration between civil society organizations representing the more moderate and mainstream climate movement with the more radical climate justice wing. A recent volume on climate movement politics notes that their narrative “has basically been a story of how a deeply divided movement found new unity and then became divided again” (Thörn et al 2017: 237).

Among IR scholars and political scientists, this story of the climate justice movement is told as one that is primarily internal to the story of climate governance and the UNFCCC more generally. From this perspective, climate justice is best understood as a discursive “frame” that the movement can and has chosen to adopt at certain times and under certain conditions (Hadden 2015; Allan and Hadden 2017; Cassegård et al eds,

2017). More specifically, climate justice is associated with a more “contentious” political frame, one that places a critique of the system at the center of the movement’s discourse.

This contentious politics or agonistic framing is generally contrasted with approaches that emphasize consensus-building and cooperation in global climate politics (Pepermans and

Maeseele 2016; Kenis 2016). This includes politics of CAN, whose explicit purpose since its founding has been to represent a unified civil society in global climate politics.155

154 COP15 saw the largest police action in Danish history, and the widespread repression of civil society together with the poor management of the negotiations by the Danish government triggered a political crisis in the country [CITE]. 155 http://www.climatenetwork.org/about/about-can 245

One effect of this narrative is to downplay how the climate justice movement has developed outside of the confines of the UNFCCC and against the capitalist nation-state system. In contrast to this systemic perspective of the climate movement, in which climate justice is predominantly seen as a frame or set of normative principles to shape climate governance institutions (e.g. Hadden 2015), or the movement itself is conceptualized predominantly as “global governors,”156 we need to analyze the climate justice movement as an antisystemic movement that has developed as much against and without the system as with(in) it. This means decentering the formal, institutional politics of the UNFCCC, or at least situating these politics in relation to climate justice as a broader antisystemic movement that goes beyond what a network or contentious politics approach can encompass.

It is noteworthy to consider another way in which the academic and activist literatures on climate justice have framed their analyses: for political scientists and IR scholars of the movement, the focus is almost always framed in relation to the international negotiations and the COPs. Among the more “activist” perspectives however, there is remarkably little consideration of what role the climate movement can or even ought to try to play with respect to the international negotiations or the UNFCCC, as it is mostly taken-for-granted that the international negotiations are doomed to failure.

Instead, most activist perspectives insist that the focus ought to be directed towards the so-called “frontlines,” including the sites of extraction, production, and exchange of the

156 “This article makes explicit what other authors have noted more casually – that [global social movements] are global governors” (Bennett 2012: 801). 246 fossil fuel economy where the climate crisis must be tackled at its source. In turn, what we are left with are political scientific analyses of the role of the climate justice movement in high-level negotiations where the movement itself expects to have little direct impact, and activist perspectives who fail to account for the critical role that geopolitics have to play in shaping the political fields in which they organize and conduct their struggles.157

To see climate justice as an antisystemic movement means to extend the analysis beyond the history and geography of the ‘systemic movement’ of the UNFCCC and

CAN. While the epistemic communities of climate scientists and environmental NGOs have played an important role in shaping the climate justice movement, especially insofar as there are several key ‘bridge’ organizations (like Friends of the Earth-International) who remain affiliated with CAN as well as one or more distinct climate justice coalitions,158 the climate justice movement is better understood as a convergence of this more systemic ‘climate movement’ with at least two other antisystemic movements:

‘localized’ movements for environmental justice, on the one hand, and ‘globalized’ movements for social and economic justice. The first can be considered the broader set of movements and struggles for “environmental justice” taking place around the world.

Movements for environmental justice, or what is sometimes called the

“environmentalism of the poor,” have a long history all across the world. While the term

“environmental justice” was first popularized by environmental sociologists like Robert

157 Notable exceptions exist of course, such as Patrick Bond (2012) and John Foran (2014) – a geographer and a sociologist, respectively, by training (see also Bond et al 2014). 158 In the case of FOE-I, they are members of both CAN and DCJ, currently the leading climate justice network organization in the UNFCCC after the dissolution of CJN!. 247

Bullard studying organized resistance by communities of color against “environmental racism” in the United States during the 1980s, today the framework of environmental justice encompasses a broad range of subaltern struggles, ranging including indigenous struggles for land and territorial rights to organized urban waste recyclers’ movements.

Many point to the signing of the Bali Principles of Climate Justice as a key moment in the history of the climate justice movement, yet it is often overlooked that these principles were themselves adopted from the Principles of Environmental Justice developed a decade earlier. Recognizing the crucial role that these subaltern movements and struggles have played in creating the groundwork for a climate justice movement is a necessary step towards overcoming the whitewashed narratives of environmentalism, which have traditionally pitted ‘enlightened’ interests of urban, educated, bourgeois populations, including epistemic communities of climate scientists in the developed world, against those of hungry masses in the developing world.

If movements for environmental justice are primarily distinguished by their

‘localized’ character, then the ‘globalized’ character of the antisystemic movements since

1968 – referred to as the ‘alter-globalization,’ ‘global justice,’ or ‘new’ social movements159 – is what distinguishes this third component of the contemporary climate justice movement. As Arrighi, Hopkins, and Wallerstein (2014[1989]) argue, antisystemic movements are distinct to the extent that work to integrate their struggles across time and space, historically with past moments in world history (1848, 1861, 1917,

159 The term “anti-globalization” was commonly used by journalists and observers during the 1990s to refer to these protests and demonstrations, such as during the famous “Battle of Seattle” at the WTO meetings in 1999, however the term 248

1968) and geographically (alongside, on behalf of, and in solidarity with marginalized and oppressed peoples everywhere). These antisystemic movements and their organizations since 1848 are, for the first time in history, “preeminently political… focused on structures of ‘this world’” (Arrighi, Hopkins, and Wallerstein 2014[1989]:

30).

As an antisystemic movement climate justice, like the global just and decolonization movements before it, has a contradictory relationship with the capitalist nation-state system: the movement is at once embedded in these structures and institutions and yet struggles to resist and overcome them. The goal for antisystemic movements is not simply to seize or exercise power using the existing institutions and structures: the goal is ultimately to abolish and transcend them altogether. This is precisely what makes the antisystemic movement for climate justice qualitatively distinct from—yet dialectically related to—the systemic movement associated with the mainstream climate movement.

However, this raises the central question at the heart of the contradiction: if climate justice is an antisystemic movement, how and why do they participate in the institutions and structures of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate

Change? What makes the politics of climate justice antisystemic? To answer these questions we turn to Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony.

249

5.3. Ecological Hegemony and the Political Praxis of Climate Justice: A Gramscian Framework

Scholars in the Neo-Gramscian tradition of IR theory have long recognized the role of hegemony in organizing state and civil society in global climate politics. For example, Newell and Levy (2002) use insights from Gramsci to analyze how business actors exercise considerable influence within the UNFCCC during climate negotiations despite having relatively limited physical presence within COP spaces (see also Levy and

Egan 2003). Neo-Gramscian approaches have also been used to analyze the institutions and practices of climate governance (e.g. Okereke, Bulkeley, and Schroeder 2009).

A few scholars have applied this Gramscian lens towards the politics of the climate justice movement. Ciplet, Roberts, and Khan (2015) utilize a Neo-Gramscian approach, defined by a “strategic view of power,” to show how the politics of climate change and the UNFCCC have been shaped by struggles for hegemony among competing historical blocs in the run-up to the 2015 Paris Agreement. They effectively demonstrate how the climate justice movement can be viewed as a historical bloc competing for hegemony alongside other historical blocs, including “Big Fossil” (otherwise known as fossil capital [Malm 2016]) and the various negotiating groups within the UNFCCC.

They show how the struggle for hegemony among these competing historical blocs has important implications for the future of climate politics, and by extension, climate justice.

Mann and Wainwright (2018) use Gramscian political theory to elaborate their conception of an emergent planetary state apparatus to regulate climate change in Climate

Leviathan. As they demonstrate, using a close reading of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks as well as Poulantzas’s influential reading of Gramsci, the concept of hegemony refers not 250 just to particular political strategies deployed in specific contexts, but is a “Marxian historical-critical category and general social relation,” a process which defines the very grounds on which politics and the political take shape (Mann and Wainwright 2018, 90).

According to Mann and Wainwright, two central questions will define the political structure of the emergent responses to planetary climate governance. First is “whether the prevailing economic formation will continue to be capitalist or not,” defined by the predominance of commodity production and organized according to the ever-expanding circuit of capital accumulation, or M-C-M`. Second is “whether a coherent planetary sovereignty will emerge, that is, whether sovereignty will be reconstituted for the purposes of planetary management” (Mann and Wainwright 2018: 28-29). While they note that our current trajectory is toward Climate Leviathan, which includes both capitalism and a form of planetary sovereignty,160 the potential social formation that they identify as corresponding with the political project of climate justice (“Climate X”) is both anti-capitalist and anti-sovereign (Mann and Wainwright 2018).

My approach builds upon these perspectives and focuses on global climate politics from the standpoint of climate justice as an antisystemic movement and historical bloc. Rather than focusing on “state” (as IR tends to do) or “non-state” actors (as social- movement studies tend to do) abstracted from each other, the concept of historical bloc enables us to see how dynamic coalitions of diverse sets of actors and interest groups

160 Mann and Wainwright see this emergent planetary sovereignty in the form of a geopolitical authority capable of unilaterally declaring a “planetary exception” and intervening to manipulate the Earth’s system to counteract the effects of climate change, ie geoengineering (Mann and Wainwright 2018: 148). 251 work together for strategic purposes. Antisystemic movements can thus be considered a form of historical bloc, though not all historical blocs are antisystemic movements.

While Gramscian and Neo-Gramscian approaches have played an important role in analyzing the politics of climate change (e.g. Newell and Levy 2002; Levy and Egan

2003; Okereke, Bulkeley, and Schroeder 2009; Ciplet et al 2015), there has been relatively little engagement between Gramscian political theory and Marxist ecology among scholars of global environmental politics.161 Gramsci’s insights do not merely extend towards understanding the strictly ‘social’ dimensions of human relations with other humans, but Gramsci, like Marx, is increasingly recognized as a profoundly ecological thinker as well (Mann 2009; Ekers and Loftus 2012; Ekers et al, eds 2013; cf.

Fontana 2013). To the extent that Marxism as a critical intellectual and political tradition is predicated upon an adequately dialectical, historical, and materialist conception of the relations between humans and nature, Marxism has been ecological from the beginning

(Foster 2000; Moore 2015; Saito 2017; Foster and Burkett 2017). Politics mediates the relations between humans and nature, including the specific modes characteristic of organizing social and environmental re/production.

Hegemony is the central political concept underpinning Gramsci’s “philosophy of praxis” in the Prison Notebooks, a thread that integrates and unifies the voluminous works.162 Gramsci developed his concept of hegemony to express the leadership of a historical bloc in a given social and historical formation (e.g. the capitalist world-system),

161 Marxist geographers Mann and Wainwright (2018) make a notable exception. 162 “This guiding thread that organises all of Gramsci’s carceral research can be succinctly characterised as the search for an adequate theory of proletarian hegemony in the epoch of the ‘organic crisis’ or the ‘passive revolution’ of the bourgeois ‘integral State’.” (Thomas 2009a: 136) 252 and the dialectic of coercion and consent that organizes these political relations (Gramsci

2005[1971]). According to Gramsci, hegemony is thus “ethical-political” insofar as it is manifest in the production of consent among the ruled by the ruling class or social group; at the same time, hegemony “must also be economic, must necessarily be based on the decisive function by the leading group in the nucleus of economic activity” (Gramsci

Q13, §18; 2005[1971], 161). This conception of hegemony differs from the way it is traditionally used in IR scholarship, which is identifiable with political, economic, or ideological domination. Instead, “stable rule is contingent not on pure coercion (although coercion is always present in some capacity), but on leadership of a ruling group and the consent of an interclass alliance to the conditions of this rule. Hegemony is never complete, and therefore the ruling group must continually struggle to earn the consent of the subordinate class” (Ciplet, Roberts, and Khan 2015: 27).

Gramsci’s dialectical conception of politics under capitalism sees state and civil society relations as co-produced out of a shared historical process. There is thus a double internality to state-society relations, insofar as the mechanisms of state power extend beyond the more narrowly defined state apparatus associated with the “everyday concept,” at the same time that the state itself is embedded in a broader social and historical field of relations and processes (Jessop 2016). In fact, it is the formal separation

(or “regionalization”) of the state from civil society that constitutes “the specifically political character of the capitalist state” (Poulantzas 2008[1965]: 83, quoted in Mann and Wainwright 2018: 83). In global climate politics, this regionalization of state and civil society is manifest in the institutional structure of the UNFCCC and its formal

253 divisions between state parties and non-state civil-society observer organizations and spaces.

The dialectical relation between coercion and consent is fundamental for the relationship between hegemony and the state system: in capitalism, the coercive apparatuses of the state qua political society cannot be fully disentangled from the production of consent by institutions of civil society. Under conditions of capitalist hegemony, the real effectiveness of the power exercised by the hegemonic class through the integral state system is that the coercive means of political society are mostly reserved for the moments of crisis when the spontaneous consent of civil society has failed

(Gramsci Q12, §1*; 2005[1971], 12). Ideological hegemony and political domination are thus not “qualitatively distinct from one another” but “strategically differentiated forms of a unitary political power” (Thomas 2009a: 163).

The importance of hegemony as a critical concept comes not just from its value in describing or understanding the world as it is (under current conditions of capitalist hegemony), but enabling a conception of the world as it could be, and the strategic means of realizing such a world politically, in and through the realization of hegemony by antisystemic struggles. Hegemony is not just a “strategy” but a “Marxian historical- critical category and general social relation: the outcome of a process through which the masses consent—for reasons both economic and ethico-political—to a historic bloc’s assertion of its particular interest as the universal interest” (Mann and Wainwright 2018:

90). Or as Peter Thomas puts it, Gramsci’s theory of hegemony

attempts to provide an analysis of the ‘production’ or, more exactly, the ‘constitution of the political’… as a distinct social relation within… the 254

bourgeois ‘integral state.’ ‘Hegemony’ describes the processes of this constitution, or the way in which historically identifiable political practices—the social relations of communication, coordination and organization of the project of a particular class or social group—have come to define the nature of ‘politics’ as such… [T]his analysis forms the foundation for an attempt to think the possibility of a notion of a political ‘of a completely different type’… a notion and practice of ‘the political’ that would be adequate to the formation of what Gramsci calls a ‘self- regulated society’” (Thomas 2009b: 28-29).

The concept and framework of hegemony, in other words, offer the possibility of enabling not only an understanding that “another world is possible” but also the actual strategic means of potentially realizing it. Hegemony is thus a necessary and critical concept for the historic bloc that is the CJM, as its antisystemic nature manifests as a struggle against capitalism and the state system. The hegemony of a particular class

(capitalists) and its corresponding social system (capitalism) may be resisted and opposed, but the overturning or restructuring of that order can only be achieved through the realization of an “alternative” hegemony, a politics of a completely different type.

Thus, applying this framework to antisystemic movements for climate justice enables conceptualizing political conditions of possibility for realizing climate justice.

My framework for the political praxis of climate justice integrates a Gramscian theory of hegemony as a dialectic of coercion and consent with the concept of antisystemic movements from the world-systems tradition. The conception of “praxis” comes from Marxist critical theory and its analysis of the antisystemic movements against capitalism, one that expresses, “in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes”

(Marx and Engels 2010[1848]). The aim is not simply to understand the world but to do 255 so in order to change it, such that political “theory” and “praxis” comprise a dialectic

(Petrovic 1983). I also use the concept of political praxis to distinguish its self-reflexive nature from the more general theories of political “practices” and “habits” in IR.163

Internally-oriented Externally-oriented

Consent Praxis A: Planning and Organization Praxis B: Discourse and Communications

Coercion Praxis C: Lobbying and Orderly Political Force Praxis D: Direct Action and Disorderly Political Force

Table 3: Hegemonic Political Praxis

Table 2 presents a four-fold typology of hegemonic political praxis by antisystemic movements, organized along two dimensions. The Y-axis corresponds with

Gramsci’s conception of hegemony as a dialectic of coercion and consent: that is, it represents the form of force relation that is expressed (predominantly coercive or consensual). The X-axis corresponds with the orientation of the movement’s force relations: are they predominantly internally directed, towards reproducing the systemic order, or are they predominantly externally oriented towards actors or institutions outside or beyond the movement, including the disruption of a given order?

This typology consists of four forms that political praxis by antisystemic movements may take: Praxis A, which is internally-oriented and predominantly

163 In political science, “practice” is a general concept that references the “activities” that political actors do or perform (Adler and Pouliot 2011), whereas “praxis” and “habit” may be used to indicate two poles on a spectrum of practices or practical activities. Whereas “praxis” is defined by its intimate relationship with theory and its reflexive (conscious and self-referential) nature, “habits” are characterized by a lack of reflexivity and/or self-awareness (Hopf 2010). 256 consensual (Organizing and Planning); Praxis B, which is predominantly externally- oriented and consensual (Outreach and Communications); Praxis C, which is predominantly oriented towards reproducing the internal relations of a given social- relational order via coercive means (Lobbying and Orderly Political Force); and Praxis D, which uses coercive means to externally intervene to disrupt a given social-relational order (Direct Action and Disorderly Political Force). These are not categorical distinctions but dialectical ones that are inherently relational and in important ways presuppose one another. Much of the organizing and planning is to coordinate strategy and actions; actions often need publicity to have effects; shaping discourse is important for meaningful actions, and actions can shape discourse; direct action can apply pressure for legislative struggles, while legislative and formal politics have important implications for what types of direct action are feasible and desirable; etc.

5.4. Methods and Fieldwork

My research draws from a broadly critical and reflexivist tradition in IR,164 which

I apply to analyzing the politics of the CJM. I draw further methodological insights from critical human geography approaches that see geographical fieldwork as methods of

“writing the world.” This participatory and reflexive approach begins from the standpoint that we are always already in the field, and that by participating in the act of research we participate in ongoing processes of production and contention that not only take place in

164 For more on the relationship between critical theory, reflexivity, and fieldwork methods in IR, see e.g. Vrasti 2008, Hamati-Ataya 2012, and Coleman 2015. 257 the world(s) we inhabit, but also actively serve to produce and reproduce these worlds.

These relations and processes are laden with power dynamics, thus our analyses are always already political, before we ever even go into the field.165

This critical perspective means that my analysis of the CJM is, at least in some small part, contributing to the production of the movement and its (attempts at self-) representation. This is distinct from positivist social movement studies and network approaches in global environmental politics that focus on describing actually-existing organizational networks. Instead, the critical approach I adopt sees part of its work as “to trace and highlight the interconnections between specific issues and particular repertoires of action, organization, and understanding within movements and the broader social relations of production that—explicitly or implicitly—they confront" (Barker et al 2013:

13).

My field research uses three primary methods: participant observation of climate justice and other actors, organizations, and events surrounding the COP23 in Bonn,

Germany; exploratory and semi-structured interviews with observers and participants of the COP23; and analysis of texts and other material produced about or by actors participating in and relating to the events. This use of multiple methodological techniques is known as triangulation; it offers multiple perspectives and means by which not only to

165 On geographical fieldwork as a critical method of “writing the world” (in contrast to the empiricist ethnographic tradition), see Wainwright (2013, Chapter 5). More generally my approach draws on critical and site-specific field research methods and approaches informed by scholar-activist perspectives from critical human geography, political ecology, and critical feminism (e.g. Hale ed. 2008; Reitan and Gibson 2012; Mason 2013; Coleman 2015; Kapiszewski, MacLean, and Read 2015; Russell 2015). 258 gather and produce information but also to cross-check, validate or refute, and update interpretations, from the field (Kapiszewski, MacLean, and Read 2015).

Preparation began in Fall 2016, when I began making contact with climate justice organizations and activists that would attend the COP22 in Marrakech, Morocco. Once on site in early November 2016, I conducted exploratory field research, including participant observation, exploratory and semi-structured interviews, and textual analysis of documents and text produced by and about the events, actors, and organizations of the

COP22. I also conducted follow-up interviews and textual analysis after the COP22 and in the run-up to the COP23 in Bonn in November 2017. For the COP23 in Bonn, I obtained UNFCCC accreditation as an observer on behalf of the American Association of

Geographers and Corporate Europe Observatory, both associated with the Research and

Independent Organizations constituency. Throughout, I used a variety of sampling techniques, including convenience, snowball, emergent, and theoretically-motivated sampling to build my base of contacts and collect texts. I have remained in close contact with my fellow subject-objects of analysis in the CJM. This close contact, reciprocity, and affinity with the communities we work with is an important part of what makes scholar-activist research distinct from most other social scientific approaches.

As a moment in the ongoing history of the capitalist world-ecology, contemporary conditions in global climate politics are defined by two key features which distinguish it from ‘pre-Paris’ climate politics: the achievement of the Paris Agreement and the ongoing consolidation of the Paris Regime in world politics. A second key feature of the post-Paris conjuncture is the rise and expansion of reactionary nationalist movements,

259 most notably the Trump Administration in the United States, but also Brexit in the UK, as well as other right-wing movements in Eastern Europe, and South and SE Asia. The tensions and contradictions of these countervailing movements provide an important context to the dialectic of governance and resistance at the 2017 COP-23 in Bonn,

Germany, which forms the basis of my field research in this chapter.

These conditions are generative of two intersecting dynamics, each of which in have antecedents as well as parts of the broader historical dialectic of the capitalist world- ecology. The first is the increasing expansion and participation of non-state actors and social movements in world politics, including the UNFCCC. The second, related trend is the increasing radicalization of the climate justice movement. In the wake of Paris and all its contradictions – paradoxes of expansion and participation of civil society, reactionary backlash by right-wing populism, and increasing gaps between ambitions and achievements – the movement for climate justice sees its ambitions as necessarily universalizable and revolutionarily systematic. Not only does the struggle for climate justice frame itself as intersectional, deliberately orienting itself towards transcending various axes of oppression, by incorporating struggles for environmental as well as social, economic, gender, racial, indigenous, generational, etc. justice, much of the movement frames its politics as anti-capitalist, anti-state, and de-colonial as well, embracing explicitly systematic critiques while framing specific goals, targets, and objectives.166

166 Two popular slogans observed at climate justice gatherings reflect this: “CLIMATE JUSTICE IS: Gender Justice, Racial Justice, Indigenous Justice, Labor Justice, Economic Justice, LGBTQ+ Justice, Disability Justice, Elder Justice, Children’s Justice”; and “Trump is the Symptom; Capitalism is the Disease; Socialism is the Solution” (author’s observations). 260

During my time in Bonn, a total of approximately three weeks from late October to mid-November 2017, I was embedded with and participated alongside three network organizations that associate with the global climate justice movement: the Global

Campaign to Demand Climate Justice (DCJ); the Beyond Gas network; and Ende

Gelände. These organizations were selected on the basis of various criteria, including their prominence within the climate justice movement, the diversity and representativeness of their membership base, the diversity and representativeness of their political tactics, their organizational profiles and goals which relate to climate and environmental justice, and relative ease of access. While these three organizational networks are by no means exhaustive of all the climate justice actors present in and around the COP23, they do encompass a broad swath of tendencies and orientations in global climate justice politics and, accordingly, share key features which together make them useful representatives of the movement.

The Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice (DCJ) is characterized by a formal network structure with an elected leadership and membership base of dozens of organizations throughout the world, including diverse representation among both Global

North and South. DCJ as a network organization has largely filled the void left by the dissolution of the Climate Justice Now! (CJN) network in the years after their split from

Climate Action Network.167 As the primary network for the climate justice movement within the UNFCCC, DCJ serves a role similar to that which CAN provides for the

167 Author interview with Nathan Thanki, 03/08/18. CJN! never formally dissolved, but their website and listserv have been inactive for years. 261

broader, and more mainstream, climate movement. Some, like Friends of the Earth

(FOE), are “bridge” organizations (Hadden 2015) that are dual members in DCJ and

CAN. DCJ provides perhaps the most comprehensive overview of the diversity of

strategies and tactics in the climate justice movement, as DCJ employs practically all the

strategies and techniques we observed among climate justice organizations at the COP23.

This includes issuing formal demands and directly participating in the climate talks

themselves as observer constituency organizations, while also supporting radical

demands and direct actions outside the formal spaces.

DCJ Beyond Gas Ende Gelände Formal network Informal network structure, with Informal, very loose, network, Structure structure, with no discernable formal leadership, based around affinity groups and leadership (elected) and and informal membership (email “fingers membership list) Loose network of German and Network of anti-gas activists and European environmentalist and organizations; developed History Evolved out of CJN! alter-globalization activists; no independently of COP processes split from CAN discernable formal ties with (Beyond Gas conference in other organizations, including 2016) UNFCCC Comprised of North Predominantly based/focused in and South orgs, with Predominantly German Europe/Mediterranean region, Social Global South, esp. SE organization with other but expanding along global composition Asia, well represented European and non-European chains of resistance to fossil in membership and volunteers and participants economy leadership All strategies and Advocacy and awareness, plus Strategies and tactics focus on Preferred tactics of mainstream formal (non-electoral) direct action, which spark and tactics and orgs, with support for campaigns and lobbying; also support legal struggles led by strategy more radical demands support and coordinate direct allies and direct action action Table 4. Key Climate Justice Movement organizations and features at COP23

262

The Beyond Gas network is less a formal organization than an informal network of activists working on issues and organizing relating to halting, and reversing, the development of the global gas economy. With no formal leadership positions and membership based on an email list, most Beyond Gas members are also active with other organizations. Unlike DCJ (or CAN) Beyond Gas primarily consists of individual activists, not organizations. Beyond Gas is also distinct from other prominent climate justice organizations as it has developed mostly independently of the UNFCCC and COP processes. Beyond Gas traces its origins to a 2016 conference in Brussels of international

NGOs, grassroots organizations, and frontline communities resisting fossil gas development. Strategies of networking and fostering cooperation and collective action with other like-minded actors and networks was a primary goal for Beyond Gas activists at the COP (author interview with Noelie Audi-Dor, January 2018). Geographically, the

Beyond Gas network has developed largely along the “chains of accumulation” (Robbins

2014) of the fossil gas industry, particularly throughout Europe and the Greater

Mediterranean.168 Many members of the Beyond Gas network work closely with EU politics as critical observers and registered lobbyists for their parent organizations, while also collaborating with local communities resisting fossil development in their backyards, working to expand their networks internationally and globally.

The third major climate justice group profiled here is Ende Gelände. Of the three climate justice coalitions active in and around the COP-23 in Bonn, Ende Gelände is

168 Beyond Gas was active in building connections with North African and Western Asian anti-gas activists during COP22 in Marrakech as well (author’s participant observation). 263 perhaps the most “loosely” connected and informal network. Ende Gelände had no direct interaction or presence within the formal negotiating spaces of the COP23; rather, they used the conference as an opportunity to stage a direct action against the Hambacher open-pit coal mine, one of the largest coal mines in the world, less than an hour from the negotiations. As an organization, Ende Gelände can best be understood as a loose network of predominantly German and European environmental activists, many of whom have had experience in other social and environmental movement organizing.169 Their organizational structure has developed out of their history in direct action organizing and mobilization, whose primary units consist of, firstly affinity groups, which then assemble as part of larger “fingers” (see below for more information on Ende Gelände’s organizational structure). The fact that Ende Gelände had no real formal presence inside the COP, but instead used the opportunity to stage its direct action and build an effective resistance movement to extraction and the fossil fuel industry, reflects Ende Gelände’s fundamental resistance to and skepticism of global governance structures and the capacity of the capitalist nation-state system to mitigate or otherwise resolve the global ecological crisis of climate change.

169 From Ende Gelände’s website (Ende Gelände 2017): “We are a broad alliance of people from the anti- nuclear and anti-coal movements, the Rhineland and Lausitz climate camps and the Hambacher Forest anti- coal campaign. We are from grassroots climate action groups, large environmental organizations, left political groups and many other campaigns, groups and networks. We all share the belief that to stop climate change we need to take action ourselves, using civil disobedience as a powerful signal for real action to put our climate before profit.” 264

5.5. Political Praxis of Climate Justice at the COP23 in Bonn 2017

Recall the concept of hegemony as a means of orienting and organizing our approach and understanding of politics. Hegemony is not a “thing” or characteristic as much as a relation, condition, or process; hegemony is the struggle for, or production of, hegemonic ‘leadership,’ exercised through a dialectic of coercion and consent. Contrary to some interpretations of Gramsci’s concept, hegemony-as-consent, or what some call

‘ideological hegemony,’ cannot be considered wholly apart or separate from the exercise of ‘force’ or power, political hegemony or hegemony-as-coercion. Rather, we must be attuned to the precise balance or distribution of any given ‘relationship of forces’ in a given conjuncture. This has important implications insofar as we consider the power or force of non-violence, as well as for how we think about the production of consent as well. The balance of power between state and non-state forces might turn precisely on this question of the relation or balance between coercion and consent, but this distinction over the legitimate use of violence (or non-violence) then becomes less a qualitative than a quantitative distinction. The power to define who or what counts as a legitimate, or violent, political act or actor itself becomes grounds for political struggle, which has important implications apart from purely “formal” definitions and organizations of state and non-state political space, acts, institutions, and actors. Hegemony moreover implies political relations that are ‘internally’ as much as ‘externally’ oriented or constituted as well, especially insofar as it concerns “leaders” and “led.”

I have organized the political tactics and strategies of the CJM into four primary clusters based on what I observed at the COP-23: organizing and planning (Praxis A);

265 discourse and communications (Praxis B); lobbying and “orderly” forms of political pressure (Praxis C); and direct action and “disorderly” political pressure (Praxis D). It is important to note the extent to which these are not ‘categorical’ distinctions but dialectical ones that are inherently relational and in important ways presuppose one another: much of the organizing and planning is for how to coordinate strategy and actions; actions often need publicity to have effects; shaping discourse is important for meaningful actions, and actions can shape discourse; direct action can apply pressure for legislative struggles, while legislative and formal politics has important implications for what types of direct action are feasible and desirable; etc.

These clusters of political praxis have been organized according to the two dimensions we can associate with Gramsci’s conception of hegemony: ‘internal’ and

‘external’ orientation along the X-axis, and ‘consent’ and ‘coercion’ along the Y-axis.

Again it is important to note that as dialectical categories, they are intrinsically related with one another, and not considered exhaustive or exclusive. As different valences of praxis, each has their own set of characteristics and potential strengths/weaknesses with regards to a broader set of practical goals or strategic visions. Accordingly, different actors and organizations may assign different priorities towards different sets of practices and actions, depending on the objectives and values of the subject, while the strategic field or material context itself also acts as a conditioning factor on the effectiveness or value of each set of tactics. In other words, these are highly contingent and relational categories and should only be useful to the extent that they further enable theory and praxis.

266

5.5.1 Praxis A: Organizing and Planning

The first mode or set of political “praxis” I observed and participated in throughout the COP23 corresponds with organizing and planning (Praxis A). Specific activities include:

Praxis A: Organizing and Planning Praxis B: Discourse and Communications -Assemblies, planning meetings, action -Organizing press conferences and press meetings, networking, coordinating, releases; publicizing actions, demands, deliberating, recruiting, building linkages critiques; symbolic demonstrations and across and beyond groups protests; media exchange -In many ways a necessary condition for any -Closely related to Praxis A but oriented as of the other modes of praxis much outwards as inwards

Praxis D: Direct Action and Disorderly Praxis C: Lobbying and Orderly Political Political Force Force -These are disorderly to the extent that they -Working “with(in)” the political system to seek to actively disrupt the status quo, and achieve change ultimately break the circuits of Capital and -Work behind the scenes with Parties and State negotiators, as well as formal interventions; -Much of this (necessarily) takes place beyond Filing petitions and legal claims in court; the UNFCCC institutions and on the Lobbying for passage of a particular bill or “frontlines”; this partly due to material and resolution strategic necessity of (re)focusing on sites of -Important to note how these politics are extraction and production of fossil fuels, but mediated by institutions (particularly the can also take place within the context of the State) and representatives UNFCCC/COPs (e.g. staging walkouts or other disruptive actions)

Table 5. Political Praxis of the Climate Justice Movement

267

• The DCJ Assembly, which convened members and representatives of DCJ-

affiliated organizations from all over the world. Here DCJ members provided

updates about ongoing campaigns and struggles; revisited goals and strategic

objectives; planned events and strategy for the upcoming COP and next year;

created working groups on key issues (War and Militarism; Land, Food, and

Water; and Impacted Peoples); and reviewed organizational structure and elected

new leadership positions. This also provided an opportunity for networking and

socialization. The assembly was held at a community center in Bonn prior to the

start of the official conference, and as such reflects part of the inside/outside

dynamics of the COP (Bäckstrand et al 2017).

• Regular planning meetings: During the two weeks of the conference, DCJ held

regularly scheduled planning and update meetings in one of the meeting rooms

inside the designated civil society space (Bonn Zone). These meetings, open to

anyone who identified with the climate justice movement at the conference,

provided an opportunity for DCJers to network and connect face-to-face,

providing updates and sharing information regarding current and upcoming events

at the COP. Many, if not most, regular planning meetings were held on the

conference site, but some were off-site as well.

• Action meetings: Typically held as needed, these took place usually right after the

regular planning meetings or prior to scheduled events/actions. Action meetings

also took place both within the official conference site (as in most DCJ and some

268

Beyond Gas action meetings) but often took place off-site as well (Ende Gelände

and Beyond Gas).

• Debriefings: These took place after particularly intensive actions or events, and

provided space for reflection, discussion, and analysis of the events/actions. These

were important for providing spaces for mutual- and self- care, which is key to the

movement’s ethos and self-reproduction.

These forms of political praxis have important implications primarily in terms of the internal constitution of the movement. That is, they are primarily oriented towards the internal self-organization and reproduction of the movement: values, goals, and targets are discussed and set; ideas and proposals are shared and considered; morale is assessed and boosted. These forms of political action are important for the constitution of the movement’s self-identity, which is necessary for their capacity to act.170 Accordingly, consent plays a more important role than coercion here, though this is not to say that dissent and discord are absent from these practices.

5.5.2. Praxis B: Discourse and Communications

This category includes activities encompassing a wide of variety of scale and form ranging from: organizing press conferences, press releases, and side events at the

COP or other related events; publicizing actions, demands, and critiques of particular actors, proposals, or the system; symbolic demonstrations and protests, including the annual climate justice march; as well as exchanges and interactions with media, including

170 This insight is central to the research program on ontological security (Mitzen 2006). 269 networking and coordinating with journalists and mass media as well as sharing information, photos, and videos via social media.

What these diverse forms of political action have in common is that they can all largely be considered under the rubric of symbolic political action. These forms of political praxis mobilize images, ideas, values, norms, and other forms of “social” power to achieve political aims. Accordingly, the “targets” of these forms of political actions can include political allies, opponents, and undecided or neutral political actors but on an individual and collective basis. In other words, various targets or intended subjects of a given symbolic action may be pinpointed by various intended messages, including coercive rhetoric (Krebs and Jackson 2007).171

While communications and discourse (Praxis B) share much in common with organizing and planning (Praxis A), especially as symbolic power is the primary currency of exchange, it can be said to differ to the extent that it is directed externally more than internally per se. Organizing and planning sessions, while nominally open spaces, where nevertheless primarily spaces that the movement created for itself. Press conferences, public demonstrations, the climate justice march, and other actions of the Praxis B category primarily concern communicating ideas, goals, demands, and other messages to an external audience. These public demonstrations and events are means of reproducing a

171 For example, a DCJ press conference under the platform of “Reclaim Power” may simultaneously seek to, within the context of a single action: generate increased awareness about the gap between projected emissions scenarios and current emissions reductions commitments by parties to the Paris Agreement; challenge political allies to step up, demand, and take action for stronger commitments; call out (and try to “shame”) wealthy industrialized states for failing to take on their “fair share” of emissions reductions commitments; invoke and clarify norms around a conception of “climate justice” and “common but differentiated responsibility”; and express solidarity and encouragement towards allies and comrades working and fighting on the frontlines for climate justice. 270 shared sense of identity and purpose, but they are not typically spaces of deliberation and equivocation. The success and efficacy of sharing messages publicly come in large part because most of the hard work had already been executed through the planning and organizing sessions. Success at Praxis B is due in large part to successes in Praxis A.

Accordingly, consent is still the primary medium of power, but given the centrality of name-and-shame tactics to the climate justice movement’s discursive politics, coercive rhetoric still plays a role in obtaining consent, again demonstrating the need for an adequately dialectical conception of hegemony.

5.5.3. Praxis C: Lobbying and Orderly Political Force

The next two categories of political praxis by the CJM can be understood, in part, by their relationship with the underlying systemic order. Broadly speaking, Praxis C involves working within the constraints of the actually-existing political and social- institutional order for climate justice. It is thus considered according to its inward orientation, working “within” and through the system to achieve change. However, to the extent that it actively seeks to create change, albeit change within an actually-existing status quo, it can be considered associated with the power of coercion: with Praxis C, political force or pressure is applied to create change within given institutional constraints. This includes, but is not limited to, working in and through the political institutions that constitute the UNFCCC and broader capitalist nation-state system. This clearly constitutes a wide variety of ostensibly “political” behavior and practices which are characterized precisely by their more overtly political dimensions in the formal sense.

In other words, the political practices, strategies, and tactics of Praxis C can be

271 distinguished by the extent to which they operate in relation with (and through) the

Gramscian integral state, as the formal constitution of political relations in the capitalist world-system. Among the various types of political tactics and strategies included within this category are lobbying and other forms of applying political pressure and collective action mediated by political representatives and state institutions.

Within the context of the COP-23, I observed two general examples of Praxis C: formal interventions on the floor and in the context of the formal negotiations and discussions and informal lobbying and other behind the scenes with Parties, negotiators, and Secretariat staff. A few general observations follow:

• Only nation-states are Parties to the UNFCCC, thus non-state actors have very

limited means of participating in international climate politics at the COP. The

principal way constituent observers can formally participate is through

interventions on the floor of general assemblies or other sessions. Unlike Parties,

who are guaranteed access to all formal negotiating sessions and for whom the

right is reserved to make interventions and formal petitions amid negotiations,

non-state observers have very limited access and capability to participate. These

formal interventions, when they occur, generally amount to brief comments to the

floor at the end of a negotiating session (two minute limit per constituency, which

in the case of environmental organizations is split between CAN and DCJ

[formerly CJN!] for one minute each). These non-state interventions are often

called off due to time constraints (author’s observations).

272

• Other opportunities exist for non-state actors to make their voices heard in less

formal contexts. The Secretariat is responsible for operating in close contact with

civil society observer organizations as a relay between states and civil society.

Many sessions and side events include opportunities for civil society observations

to raise questions and voice their concerns with members of the Secretariat.

Secretariat staff members were often busy communicating and coordinating with

observer groups when they weren’t more directly immersed with working with

the Parties.

• Much political work is also done behind the scenes between Parties, constituent

observers, and the Secretariat. It is widely recognized that many of the political

interactions that are expressed between Parties and non-state actors and

constituencies take place in the cafeteria and hallways, over coffee or lunch, and

in other ad hoc manners. For many climate justice activists and organizations,

especially in the developing world, the COP provides perhaps the best opportunity

throughout the year to engage directly with their nation-state representatives and

delegations (author observation).

• Much climate justice politics within the formal spaces of the UNFCCC and COP

system involves consideration and negotiation of institutional limits. Climate

justice activists were constantly considering questions such as how to amplify

their voices within the formal spaces of the COP without crossing institutional

thresholds of permissibility and decorum. For instance, UNFCCC rules strictly

prohibit any references to specific Parties as subjects of formal criticism, and

273

demonstrations inside UNFCCC spaces require previous approval by the

Secretariat. Violators risk de-badging of participating individuals, or even de-

certification of observer organizations. Thus, all forms of symbolic and political

action within UNFCCC spaces must take these into strategic consideration.

• Activists and organizations work hard to foster good relationships with the

Secretariat staff and are skillful at carefully pushing while respecting formal

boundaries. The Secretariat staff exercises considerable discretion in enforcing

their sanction authority. Silent protests and walk-outs are generally tolerated, and,

anecdotally, a Secretariat representative was overheard, in a meeting to

YOUNGO representatives, encouraging “more noise and protests” from the youth

constituency at the COP23 (author’s observation). Hence, there is a certain

amount of disorder that is not only sanctioned or tolerated within the UNFCCC

system but seen as crucial for ensuring the system’s legitimate authority.

5.5.4. Praxis D: Direct Action and Disorderly Political Force

Unlike the more orderly and systemic political forms associated with Praxis C, the direct action politics of Praxis D ultimately seek to disrupt, rather than reproduce, the systemic order. They are disorderly to the extent that they seek to actively disrupt the status quo and ultimately break the circuits of the capitalist nation-state system and its organization of socio-ecological reproduction. These are not disorderly in that they seek chaos; instead, direct action strives to re-organize socio-ecological relations along more democratic and egalitarian (less hierarchical and exploitative) lines than those which

274 prevail in the current system. Much like James Scott’s (2009) description of “societies beyond the state,” these only appear dis-orderly when viewed against, or from the vantage point of, the hegemonic order of the capitalist nation-state system.

Another perspective on the difference between Praxes C and D is that that the former assumes the hegemony of the capitalist system, and actually contributes to the reproduction of the existing order; the latter ultimately seeks to usurp these relations and is a means for struggling for an alternative hegemony. In other words, the Praxis D of the climate justice movement is fundamentally about working towards a politics ‘of a completely different type,’ “adequate to the formation of what Gramsci calls a ‘self- regulated society’” (Thomas 2009a: 28-29).

Direct action is therefore distinct from civil disobedience. While all civil disobedience can be considered a form of direct action (Praxis D) as well as symbolic/discursive action (Praxis B) the reverse does not necessarily apply. Advocates of civil disobedience frequently highlight the fact that getting arrested is often precisely the point, as a means of drawing increased attention to what is (perceived as) an unjust legal arrangement. Accordingly, the civil disobedience framework often presumes some semblance of legitimacy in the institutional structure that is being criticized; reforming the State, not overthrowing or dismantling it altogether is usually the objective with civil disobedience (Graeber 2009: 203). On the other hand, for direct action the point is usually not to get arrested, and often proponents of ecological direct action go to great lengths to maintain anonymity and secrecy and accordingly exercise discretion when it comes to publicity, including regarding the actions themselves (Earth First!). Again, the

275 primary objective of a direct action, and what makes direct action politically distinct, is not located in any second-order goals that require mediation by political institutions or representatives but is instead located in the materiality of the direct action itself

(Trautmann 2014[1912]; Anderson 2004; Graeber 2009; Salerno 2014).

Much of the direct action by the CJM (necessarily) takes place beyond the

UNFCCC institutions and on the frontlines of fossil fuel extraction and production.

Naomi Klein (2014) calls this “Blockadia… a roving transnational conflict zone that is cropping up with increasing frequency and intensity wherever extractive projects are attempting to dig and drill, whether for open-pit mines, or gas fracking, or tar sands oil pipelines" (254). The material and strategic necessity of these sites contributes to this focus for direct action outside the COPs, but direct action on the inside still takes place.

Walkouts and other similar activities intended to disrupt the negotiations and interrupt business-as-usual are a well-known tactic among climate justice advocates inside the

COPs (e.g. Death 2015).

Within the context of the COP23 in Bonn, I consider two primary events or actions: the Beyond Gas action organized to disrupt European Investment Bank (EIB) financial support for the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) at the World Climate Summit; and the Ende Gelände direct action occupation against the Hambacher coal mine. While

DCJ was not directly involved in organizing or leading either direct action, DCJ members did play an important part by helping facilitate, coordinate, disseminate, and participate in each action. DCJers also expressed consistent support for ecological direct action struggles by frontline communities back home in local contexts.

276

The Beyond Gas action might be considered a borderline case for Praxis D. The action itself consisted of a group of activists infiltrating the World Climate Summit, a corporate business conference organized independently of, but alongside, the COP to stage a protest against a presentation by a representative of the EIB and their investment in the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline, a major fossil fuel infrastructure project that would use public finance to connect sites of gas extraction in Central Asia with markets in Western

Europe. Once inside the conference room, the activists waited until the EIB representative was about to speak, at which point they staged an intervention. The 20 or so activists carried out a mic check (call and response) action, providing a list of demands

(Stop the TAP!), and a concise summary why they oppose the TAP, including by highlighting the human rights abuses suffered by local communities. After delivering their message that called on the EIB to refuse to invest public capital in the TAP, the activists were promptly escorted out of the premises by security and briefly detained by police. Subsequent action-related matters included disseminating information and media coverage of the action (several activists took pictures and video during the event, and two independent journalists embedded with the group recorded the entire action for later broadcast) as well as a post-action debriefing (author observations).

The other major direct action at the COP23 was the occupation of the Hambacher coal mine by Ende Gelände. The Hambacher coal mine is the world’s largest open-pit coal mine and is located less about 20km outside of Cologne, Germany, or less than an hour from the UNFCCC headquarters and conference site in Bonn. In the days and weeks leading up to the action on November 5, the day prior to the official start of the COP,

277 thousands of activists converged to prepare for the action. Approximately 4000 activists traveled to the site of the mine and surrounding villages, including one slated for destruction to expand the mine. Among the Ende Gelände activists were several occupiers of the nearby Hambacher forest, a long-running forest occupation camp which has been working to protect this old-growth forest from destruction from the mine. On the day of the action itself, a legally sanctioned march was conducted by the Blue and

Red Fingers, while the Orange, Gold, and Green Fingers converged on the mine from other directions. At the end of their march with the Blue Finger, the Red Finger converged on the mine as well, crossing the legally-designated perimeter of the private property of RWE, the German energy company that manages the Hambacher mine. The action was widely regarded as a success: all four Fingers (except the Blue finger) successfully occupied their part of the mine, shutting down operations for the mine for the afternoon, and costing the mine (and local authorities) thousands of euros in expenses. After several hours the police descended upon the occupiers, kettling, and detaining the extra-legal activists, though all were released shortly without charges.

In both cases, climate justice activists and organizations took it upon themselves to organize direct actions to intervene in attempts to stop business-as-usual. Both actions were oriented towards the end of halting the reproduction of Capital in the production of fossil fuels and the commodification of the Earth. In the case of the Beyond Gas action, this was more of a threshold case, closer to Praxis C than the Ende Gelände action insofar as the action was targeted towards an EIB official, thereby involving (arguably) an additional level of institutional mediation between the activists and their ecological

278 relations; in contrast, the Hambacher mine occupation saw Gelände activists place themselves directly between the Earth movers and the Earth. To paraphrase one of the

Ende Gelände organizers during a preparatory session for the action, the occupiers are stepping up to take action precisely because the politicians are failing to do so; Ende

Gelände “say[s] what we do, and do[es] what we say,” which means blocking diggers and conveyors with their bodies, if necessary (Author’s observation).

5.6. Conclusion

This analysis has important implications for the global politics of climate justice.

The movements for climate justice have limited potential to make direct impacts at the

COPs and must avoid reproducing the hegemonic relations that constitute the existing contradictions and antagonisms in our global ecological politics. At the same time, in order to achieve their ultimate goals, they must make their presence felt within the formal political spaces and institutions, materially and symbolically, to apply pressure to generate more favorable conditions that can enable political successes. Conferences like the COPs are important sites not just for lobbying, protests, and direct action targeting actors and institutions external to the movement itself, but also for coordination, planning, and movement-building internal to the movement. Organizing in these contexts facilitates organizing and political actions at other sites and scales.

There are thus dialectical relations between these types of global and local politics. For the climate justice movement to succeed, it is crucial that the movement is effective at organizing at specific, local sites, but must also work to coordinate across

279 borders and scales (institutionally as well as spatially). The movement cannot succeed at a global scale without a sufficient number of local victories, but conditions for local victories are themselves contingent on successes and progress made at other scales, including the global. My research thus contributes to existing literatures on transnational climate movements and governance, and responds to critics of increased contention in global climate politics by showing direct action plays an integral role in hegemonic eco- political praxis.

For research on climate justice and the climate justice movement in world politics, more attention is needed on the practical and material dimensions of climate justice, not just the normative dimensions: a coherent conception of climate justice must include not just theory but praxis. This may include increased attention to two political projects we can associate with the climate justice movement: decentralized, community- oriented practices and institutions of energy democracy (see e.g. Abramsky, ed 2010) and agro-ecology, sometimes referred to as “food sovereignty” or “food justice” (Edelman et al 2014; Cadieux and Slocum 2015).

More broadly, this chapter has other important implications regarding our understanding of the integral state system in global environmental politics, including the roles of so-called “non-state actors” in global civil society as they carry out tasks of

“climate governance” that reproduce the underlying ecological order of the capitalist nation-state system. Additionally, my approach has important theoretical and methodological implications for integrating Marxism and environmental and climate

280 change politics in political science and IR, domains of study that scholars have long recognized as underappreciated and misunderstood in large part by the discipline.172

172 On the marginalization of climate politics, see Javeline 2014; Green and Hale 2017; for a critique of the (mis)readings of Marx and Marxism in Political Science and IR, see Sclofsky and Funk 2017. 281

Conclusion – What Future(s) for Climate Justice?

I opened this manuscript by remarking on the paradox of the preface: that it is only by arriving to the ‘end’ that we may truly ‘begin.’ In writing, this is the dialectic of the idea becoming material in the form of text, the process of which transforms both the idea and the text, which not only comes into being as the first draft on the page, but ultimately refines itself and reshapes itself through the process of rewriting. And in so doing, above all else, throughout this process so too changes the writer, who comes to a new understanding of the idea, the text, and themself.

So too, much can be said the same of the human subject with the material process of labor. Through conscious, self-directed, and coordinated practical activity, humans transform ourselves and the world – through labor, as Marx reminds us, we change our external and internal nature (1976[1863]). The world may be understood and apprehended abstractly, and new understandings of the world may be produced through the process of self-reflecting thought. And yet, that knowledge and awareness, of oneself and the world, can only come to transform the self and the world through material praxis.

And in so doing, one changes oneself, the world, and the understanding of the world.

282

Yet, much like the gap between the idea and the word on the page, there is an inherent gap between the conscious subject and the world.173 This is not merely an epistemological question about the limits to knowledge, of the self, the world, or both, but a metaphysical174 question about the nature of nature, so to speak – that irreducible aspect of material reality that ultimately resists all attempts to capture, represent, control, rule, assimilate, or dominate. Any process of capturing, representing, controlling, ruling, assimilating, dominating (let alone knowing or understanding) nature will necessarily be partial and incomplete. Such is what it means to recognize nature as a thing-in-itself, which necessarily requires a perceiving subject, which we have come to recognize as human. And thus, there is no recognition of nature as such without recognition of the human as somehow distinct or apart from nature, as a self-constituting subject. And yet, as part of a broader historical dialectic of nature itself (what Marx called “natural history”), what is human is thoroughly natural – and so too nature becomes socialized.

Yet a fundamental gap remains between the ‘social’ and the ‘natural,’ even as the two are recognized as a (dialectical) unity, a unity-in-difference.

One of the implications of the foregoing analysis of the dissertation is that the self-directed organization, or mediation, of relations in nature is an eminently political process. That means that the differentiation of the social from the natural, the human from the non- (or extra-)human, is thoroughly political.

173 And, as we have understood since at least Freud, there is also a gap between the conscious subject and the(ir) knowledge of the self. 174 That is, ontological and epistemological – and refusing any strict separation between the two. 283

With no matter is this more true than with respect to the politics of climate change, or the planetary ecological crisis more generally. Perhaps the most fundamental takeaway from the Anthropocene thesis, we might say, is that the idea of an essential separation or distinction between humans and nature is no longer tenable. And yet, as

Jason Moore, Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann, and other critical, Marxist ecologists have argued, most of the solutions to the problems – including those that treat nature and politics as separate realms that must nevertheless be fused back together – does little more than reproduce or deepen the contradictions. As the systemic response or solution – ie the systemic movement – climate governance does little more than reproduce the underlying structural contradictions – of capital and state qua sovereignty – that have produced the ecological crisis in the first place.

To resolve this crisis, what is needed is an antisystemic form of climate politics that seeks to resist and ultimately break the circuits of capital and state-qua-sovereignty that currently organize our metabolic relations within nature. I call this antisystemic movement against the climate crisis, climate justice. Nature, human and non-human alike, ultimately resists all forms of rule and governance that sovereign authority seeks to impose on it. What is not needed is more or a better form of sovereign authority (ie a

‘world-state’ [cf. Wendt 2003]). What ultimately is needed is a ‘politics of another type,’ a distinctly ecological hegemony.

What would such a politics look like? I have tried to show in this dissertation how the political praxis of climate justice can be conceptualized as a distinctly ecological hegemonic form, embodying a distinct set of forms and practices to organize human (and

284 extra-human) relations. Central to this is the eco-political praxis of direct action, which I have conceptualized as attempts at a distinctly direct, democratic, and participatory form of regulating the metabolic process between humans and nature. The defining direct actions of the climate justice movement – those oriented to “Keep it in the Ground!” – are at their core not merely symbolic, but fundamentally material and political. They are above all attempts at managing or regulating the metabolism between humans and the

Earth system, directly and democratically, without the mediation of capital or the state.

And yet, direct action as praxis is not quite labor – in large measure because it has not become hegemonic.175 In order for climate justice to realize itself, it must become hegemonic, and in doing so, produce a new, and distinctly ecological, form of the political. And this is large measure must be predicated upon the reorganization of the metabolic relations between humans and nature – the labor process – along directly democratic and participatory lines. Direct action must become the hegemonic form of organizing the labor process, not the ‘indirect action’ of capital and the state.

Neither Marx nor Gramsci were uncritical of direct action as an emancipatory political strategy or tactic, and yet there is a tendency to read more into the political divisions between Marx and Gramsci with the anarchists and syndicalists on this point than perhaps is warranted. Certainly, given the profundity of the ecological crisis today and utter dearth of political imagination regarding what potential solutions exist – at least

175 Perhaps one could consider this a call for a natural history of direct action and sabotage, recognizing both the “classical” origins of this praxis in ancient class struggle to the present day, as well as the distinctly “modern” nature of the concept in capitalism and its antisystemic movements (ie the socialist, anarchist, Marxist movements). 285 relative to what the crisis demands – a rethinking of the relationship and compatibility between Marxist and anarchist theory and praxis for planetary ecological revolution is warranted.

Perhaps nowhere else is this needed more than with respect to the (potential) revolutionary subjects of the ecological politics necessary to resolve the crisis.

Traditional Marxism has defined itself by its insistence on the working class as revolutionary subject of its own emancipation. However, when looking at the world over today, it is the exception, not the norm, to see the proletariat leading the emancipatory socio-ecological transformations. Far too often, laborers and their union representatives are part of the reactionary movements against radical environmentalism. But neither is this to excuse the ecological movement for either its own bourgeois conformism (e.g. the

Green Party movement), on the one hand, or its anti-social tendencies176 (whether in the eco-pessimistic and misanthropic ideology of the deep ecologists, or antisocial violence from the fringe of the movement).

This does not necessarily displace the necessity of the working class from the revolutionary struggle against capitalism’s mode of organizing nature. Rather, it calls for us to reconsider, or expand, our conception of what counts as labor, work, and the working class.

On the one hand, this is a point made by observers of contemporary socialist politics in the US, particularly feminists and Marxists galvanized by the recent waves of

176 Recall that Trautmann distinguishes between “social” and “anti-social” direct action: indiscriminate, individualized, and/or uncoordinated acts of violence against people or property constitute the latter. 286 strikes led by teachers, nurses, and other public sector workers traditionally excluded from orthodox conceptions of the working class. Yet, as these strikes waves show, these forms of labor are absolutely integral to the process of social reproduction. Thus it is little surprise that these sectors have become frontlines of resistance, as they are among some of the last frontiers of capitalization and privatization in this neoliberal era of capitalism in the advanced, industrialized democracies in the North Atlantic core of the world- system.

The same goes for our reconsideration of the relationship between non-human animals and the work of extra-human nature in the social reproduction of capitalism, and the ecological politics (yet) to come. At a minimum, more work is needed to explore the potentials – and limits – of these relations from a Marxist ecological critique.

However, I would like to conclude with some consideration of another subject of climate justice politics: future generations. The metaphysical, conceptual, and normative challenges with future generations manifest in the limits of our capacity for political representation, for, by definition, future generations cannot represent themselves for they do not (yet) exist.177 And yet this is precisely what makes future generations so vulnerable to the impending consequences of climate change. The problem of future generations is thus one of the most profound challenges/dilemmas of climate injustice,

177 A similar problem confronts us considering the question of climate reparations: considering that so many of those individuals who bear the most direct responsibility in history for the climate crisis are dead, what accounting can we truly expect, let alone hope, to achieve with regards to historical accountability? In this case however, the problem of temporality has more to do with the question of present (and future) generations with those from the past. 287 which is in part why Stephen Gardiner (2011) calls climate change a “perfect moral storm.”

This dilemma regarding the irrepresentable nature of future generations bears similar features with the irrepresentable nature of nature. While there are ongoing philosophical debates about the ontological status of future generations, the question of the relation with nature is no less complex: nature, as that which is “non-human,” is radically other in a way such that we can only indirectly apprehend or perceive it as such, as through our own “human” subjectivity. There is no way for humans to directly apprehend nature as such because neither is there any no such singular “view from nowhere,” nor is there any way of doing so without such an experience being channeled through our own human subjectivity. So calls for us to “think like a mountain” are, at best, little more than a metaphor. The closest we may be able to come to “knowing” a nature apart from ourselves is indirectly, via what Karatani (following Kant) calls the transcendental apperception of critique. And yet, we are thoroughly natural beings, as part of nature, and nature is part of us. That we are simultaneously a part of and apart from nature is a seemingly unresolvable tension.

And yet, now perhaps more than ever at least since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Marxism as doctrine of State Socialism, there is greater recognition of the

“end” of capitalism, and the irrepressible conception of humans and nature as a unity.

Again, these are arguably two of the most fundamental implications of the

Anthropocene/Capitalocene thesis: that human civilizations have historical limits, and

288 humans and nature are fundamentally intertwined. Is this knowledge sufficient for resolving the crisis, even if it becomes “common sense”?

No, at least not according to Marx and Gramsci. Gramsci in particular was skeptical of common sense and its limits. What is necessary, according to Gramsci, is not just common sense but “good sense” – for a particularly coherent (we might add ecological), rather than disjointed, conception of the world to become hegemonic, that is the task.

Perhaps nothing represents the distinction between common sense and good sense in the hegemonic context of the capitalist climate crisis than Greta Thunberg. Greta (born

2003) is a Swedish schoolgirl who is leading an emergent climate strike movement that has, in the since she started boycotting going to class on Fridays to protest the inaction by politicians on climate change outside the legislature in Sweden, become global, with thousands of children and students organizing and participating in climate strike actions around the world (Thunberg 2019b).

What is remarkable about Greta is her capability to clearly and directly speak truth to power, regarding the hypocrisy and idiocy at the heart of our contemporary conditions. And yet, on the face of it, there is nothing all that extraordinary about what

Greta actually says: she is blunt and straightforward, and there is little that she says that an elementary schoolchild couldn’t understand. Rather, she is remarkable for the way in which she is utterly capable of disarming the politicians she criticizes, many of whom are all too happy to invite her to publicly address them.

289

Greta is also remarkable because she suggests the possibility of an otherwise seemingly impossible task: peaceful, nonviolent direct action as the best way of revolutionarily transforming the world. Greta also represents a profound challenge to traditional conceptions of revolutionary agency: she is a child (not a legal adult), female, and not employed. Greta is also neuro-atypical: she credits her Asperger’s as a “gift” that has enabled her to see the climate crisis “in black and white” (Thunberg 2019a). Despite

– or, indeed, perhaps precisely because of – these conditions of her identity, Greta is seen as representing the interests of those who cannot represent themselves: she is recognized for speaking on behalf of future generations and the Earth itself. And the revolutionary potential of her praxis lies with her non-cooperation and refusal against the circuits of the social reproduction of the capitalist (integral) state system through her school strike. This perhaps also explains why powerful representatives of fossil capital, like OPEC’s General

Secretary Mohammed Barkindo, have called Greta and others in the global climate movement their “greatest threat” (Malay Mail 2019).

The point in looking to agents of change like Greta is not necessarily to suggest that schoolchildren or students must lead the revolutionary ecological transformation that we so desperately need. In fact, there is already a Youth constituency (YOUNGO) included within the UNFCCC civil society observer organizations, which suffers from many of the same contradictions that any of the constituencies are vulnerable to.178 The

178 I was told by DCJ members with experience working in and with YOUNGO organizers and representatives that many treat YOUNGO as a stepping-stone to careers working in government or the not- for-profit sector, and thus fewer of them are actually willing to criticize, or take action against, the system they ultimately want to become further integrated within (personal observation). 290 point is not to displace the working class from the necessary revolutionary transformation of the capitalist world-ecology, but rather to broader our conception of what this ecological leadership – hegemony – might look like.

291

Works Cited

Abbott, Kenneth W. 2012. “The Transnational Regime Complex for Climate Change.” Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 30 (4): 571–90.

Abramsky, Kolya, ed. 2010. Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution. AK Press.

Adler, Emanuel, and Vincent Pouliot. 2011. “International Practices.” International Theory 3 (1): 1–36.

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press.

Agarwal, Bina. 1992. “The Gender and Environment Debate: Lessons from India.” Feminist Studies 18 (1): 119–58.

Agarwal, Anil, and Sunita Narain. 1991. Global Warming in an Unequal World: A Case of Environmental Colonialism. Centre for Science and Environment.

Alger, Justin, and Peter Dauvergne. 2018. “Researching Global Environmental Politics: Trends, Gaps, and Emerging Issues.” In A Research Agenda for Global Environmental Politics, edited by Peter Dauvergne and Justin Alger, 1–14. Edward Elgar.

Allan, Bentley B. 2017. “Producing the Climate: States, Scientists, and the Constitution of Global Governance Objects.” International Organization.

Allan, Jen Iris, and Jennifer Hadden. 2017. “Exploring the Framing Power of NGOs in Global Climate Politics.” Environmental Politics 26 (4): 600–620.

Andonova, Liliana, Michele M. Betsill, and Harriet Bulkeley. 2009. “Transnational Climate Governance.” Global Environmental Politics 9 (2): 52–73.

Andonova, Liliana B, and Ronald B Mitchell. 2010. “The Rescaling of Global Environmental Politics.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 35: 255–82.

Andreucci, Diego. 2018. “Populism, Hegemony, and the Politics of Natural Resource Extraction in Evo Morales’s Bolivia.” Antipode 50 (4): 825–45.

Angus, Ian. 2016. Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System. Monthly Review Press.

Appelbaum, Richard P., and William I. Robinson, eds. 2005. Critical Globalization Studies. Routledge. 292

Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press.

Aronoff, Kate. 2017. “Jerry Brown Lashes Out at COP23 Climate Protestors: ‘Let’s Put You in the Ground.’” In These Times. http://inthesetimes.com/article/20688/jerry-brown- cop23-climate-un-bloomberg-fracking-cap-trade-it-takes-roots Last accessed: 07/26/19

Arrighi, Giovanni. 2010[1994]. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. Verso.

Arrighi, Giovanni. 2007. Adam Smith in Beijing. Verso.

Arrighi, Giovanni, Terrence K. Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein. 2014[1989]. Antisystemic Movements. Verso.

Asafu-Adjaye, John, Linus Blomqvist, Stewart Brand, Barry Brook, Ruth Defries, Erle Ellis, David Keith, et al. 2015. An Ecomodernist Manifesto. The Breakthrough Institute. https://bit.ly/2yKaWwi Last accessed: 07/22/19

ATTAC/CADTM Maroc. 2016a. “ATTAC / CADTM Morocco Quits the Moroccan Climate Justice Coalition.” ww.cadtm.org/ATTAC-CADTM-Morocco-quits-the.

ATTAC/CADTM Maroc. 2016b. “What Strategy for the Social Movements Facing Climate Change?” http://www.cadtm.org/COP22-in-Marrakech-Morocco-What.

ATTAC/CADTM Maroc. 2016c. “‘System Change, Not Climate Change’ International Conference Safi (Morocco) 4th and 5th November 2016.” http://www.cadtm.org/System-change-not-climate-change

Ayers, Alison J., ed. 2008. Gramsci, Political Economy, and International Relations Theory. Palgrave Macmillan.

Bäckstrand, Karin, Jonathan W. Kuyper, Björn-Ola Linnér, and Eva Lövbrand. 2017. “Non-State Actors in Global Climate Governance: From Copenhagen to Paris and Beyond.” Environmental Politics 26 (4). Routledge: 561–79.

Bai, Xuemei, Sander van der Leeuw, Karen O’Brien, Frans Berkhout, Frank Biermann, Eduardo S. Brondizio, Christophe Cudennec, et al. 2015. “Plausible and Desirable Futures in the Anthropocene: A New Research Agenda.” Global Environmental Change 39: 351–62.

Barker, Colin, Laurence Cox, John Krinsky, and Alf Gunvald Nilsen, eds. 2013. Marxism and Social Movements. Brill.

293

Barrett, Scott. 1999. “International Cooperation and the International Commons.” Duke Environmental Law & Policy Forum 10: 131–45.

Barrett, Scott. 2009. “Rethinking Global Climate Change Governance.” Economics 3: 0– 13.

Barry, John, and Robyn Eckersley, eds. 2005. The State and the Global Ecological Crisis. MIT Press.

BBC News. 2015. “COP21 Climate Summit Reaches Deal in Paris.” https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35084374

Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press.

Benton, Ted, ed. 1996. The Greening of Marxism. The Guilford Press.

Bernauer, Thomas, Tobias Böhmelt, and Vally Koubi. 2013. “Is There a Democracy – Civil Society Paradox in Global Environmental Governance?” Global Environmental Politics 13 (1): 88–107.

Bieler, Andreas, and Adam David Morton, eds. 2006. Images of Gramsci: Connections and Contentions in Political Theory and International Relations. Routledge.

Biermann, Frank. 2007. “‘Earth System Governance’ as a Crosscutting Theme of Global Change Research.” Global Environmental Change 17 (3–4): 326–37.

Biermann, Frank. 2014. Earth System Governance: World Politics in the Anthropocene. MIT Press.

Biermann, Frank, and Philipp Pattberg. 2008. “Global Environmental Governance: Taking Stock, Moving Forward.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 33 (1): 277–94.

Biermann, Frank, et al. 2012. "Navigating the Anthropocene: improving earth system governance." Science: 1306-1307.

Biermann, Frank, Xuemei Bai, Ninad Bondre, Wendy Broadgate, Chen Tung Arthur Chen, Opha Pauline Dube, Jan Willem Erisman, et al. 2016. “Down to Earth: Contextualizing the Anthropocene.” Global Environmental Change 39: 341–50.

294

Biersack, Aletta, and James B. Greenberg, eds. 2006. Reimagining Political Ecology. Duke University Press.

Blaikie, Piers. 1985. The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries. Longman.

Bolon, Cecelia. 2018. “1.5 to Stay Alive: The Influence of AOSIS in International Climate Negotiations.” E-International Relations. https://www.e-ir.info/2018/11/17/1-5- to-stay-alive-the-influence-of-aosis-in-international-climate-negotiations/ Last accessed: 03/21/19

Bond, Patrick. 2012. Politics of Climate Justice: Paralysis Above, Movement Below. University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Bond, Patrick, Michael Dorsey, John Foran, Pascoe Sabido, Jim Shultz, Nathan Thanki, Brian Tokar, Richard Widick, Emily Williams, and Leehi Yona. 2014. What Now for Climate Justice? Social Movement Strategies for the Final Year of Struggle over the Next Universal Climate Treaty. International Institute of Climate Action and Theory.

Bonefeld, Werner, Richard Gunn, and Kosmas Psychopedis. 1992. Open Marxism - Dialectics and History. Edited by Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn, and Kosmas Psychopedis. Vol. I. Pluto Press.

Bonneuil, Christophe, and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene. Verso.

Bosworth, Kai. 2019. “The People Know Best: Situating the Counterexpertise of Populist Pipeline Opposition Movements.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 109 (2): 581–92.

Braun, Bruce. 2000. “Producing Vertical Territory: Geology and Governmentality in Late Victorian Canada.” Ecumene 7 (1): 7–46.

Brenner, Robert. 1977. “The Origins of Capitalist Development.” New Left Review, 25– 92.

Budd, Adrian. 2013. Class, States and International Relations: A Critical Appraisal of Robert Cox and Neo-Gramscian Theory. Routledge.

Bullard, Nicola, and Tadzio Müller. 2012. “Beyond the ‘Green Economy’: System Change, Not Climate Change?” Development 55 (1): 54–62.

295

Burke, Anthony, Stefanie Fishel, Audra Mitchell, Simon Dalby, and Daniel J. Levine. 2016. “Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 1–25.

Burkett, Paul. 1999. “Fusing Red and Green.” Monthly Review 50 (9). http://monthlyreview.org/1999/02/01/fusing-red-and-green/

Buttel, F.H. 2000. “Ecological Modernization as Social Theory.” Geoforum 31 (1): 57– 65.

Cadieux, Kirsten Valentine, and Rachel Slocum. 2015. “What Does It Mean to Do Food Justice?” Journal of Political Ecology 22: 1–26.

CAN. 2015. “Civil society responds as final Paris Climate Agreement released.” Climate Action Network. http://www.climatenetwork.org/press-release/civil-society-responds- final-paris-climate-agreement-released Last accessed: 03/29/19

Candeias, Mario. 2012. “Green Transformation: Competing Strategic Projects.” Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. Alexander Gallas, trans.

Carbon Brief. 2014. “Two degrees: The history of climate change’s speed limit.” https://www.carbonbrief.org/two-degrees-the-history-of-climate-changes-speed-limit Last accessed: 03/15/19

Carbon Brief. 2016. “Timeline: the Paris Agreement’s ‘ratchet mechanism’.” https://www.carbonbrief.org/timeline-the-paris-agreements-ratchet-mechanism Last accessed: 03/20/19

Cassegård, Carl, Linda Soneryd, Håkan Thörn, and Åsa Wettergren, eds. 2017. Climate Action in a Globalizing World. Routledge.

Castree, Noel. 2003. “Commodifying What Nature?” Progress in Human Geography 27 (3): 273–97.

Castree, Noel, and Bruce Braun, eds. 2001. Social Nature: Theory, Practice, and Politics. Blackwell.

CDC Climat Research. 2015. “Non-state actors: pushing the climate action agenda forward.” ClimasCOPe 4 (July). https://www.i4ce.org/wp-core/wp- content/uploads/2015/09/15-06-30_climascope__04_en_web_final_impression-3.pdf Last accessed: 03/23/19

296

Ceballos, Gerardo, Paul R Ehrlich, Anthony D Barnosky, Andrés García, Robert M Pringle, and Todd M Palmer. 2015. “Accelerated Modern Human – Induced Species Losses: Entering the Sixth Mass Extinction.” Sciences Advances 1 (e1400253): 1–5.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (2): 197–222.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2015. “Climate and Capital : On Conjoined Histories.” Critical Inquiry 41 (1): 1–23.

Chait, Jonathan. 2015. “The Paris Climate Deal is President Obama’s Biggest Accomplishment.” New York Magazine. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2015/12/climate- deal-is-obamas-biggest-accomplishment.html

Chatterton, Paul, David Featherstone, and Paul Routledge. 2013. “Articulating Climate Justice in Copenhagen: Antagonism, the Commons, and Solidarity.” Antipode 45 (3): 602–20.

Ciplet, David, J. Timmons Roberts, and Mizan R. Khan. 2015. Power in a Warming World. MIT Press.

Clark, Brett, and Richard York. 2005. “Carbon Metabolism: Global Capitalism, Climate Change, and the Biospheric Rift.” Theory and Society 34 (4): 391–428.

Coleman, Lara Montesinos. 2015. “Ethnography, Commitment, and Critique: Departing from Activist Scholarship.” International Political Sociology 9 (3): 263–80.

Clastres, Pierre. 1987[1973]. Society Against the State. Zone Books.

Cox, Robert W. 1983. “Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in Method.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 12 (2): 162–75.

Cox, Robert. 1986. “Social Forces, States, and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory.” In Neorealism and Its Critics, 204–54. Columbia University Press.

Cox, Robert and Timothy Sinclair. 1996. Approaches to World Order. Cambridge University Press.

Crutzen, Paul J, and Eugene F Stoermer. 2000. “The Anthropocene.” Global Change Newsletter, no. 41: 17–18.

Daly, Herman E., ed. 1973. Toward a Steady-State Economy. W.H. Freeman and Company.

297

Dauvergne, Peter, and Jennifer Clapp. 2016. “Researching Global Environmental Politics in the 21st Century.” Global Environmental Politics 16 (1): 1–12.

Davenport, Andrew. 2013. “Marxism in IR: Condemned to a Realist Fate?” European Journal of International Relations 19 (1): 27–48.

Davey, Melissa, Adam Vaughan, and Amanda Hopuch. 2014. “People’s climate march: thousands demand action around the world – as it happened.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/live/2014/sep/21/peoples-climate-march-live Last accessed: 03/23/19

Davies, William. 2014. “Neoliberalism: A Bibliographic Review.” Theoria 31 (7/8): 309–17.

Davies, Will. 2016. “The Difficulty of ‘Neoliberalism.’” Political Economy Research Centre. http://www.perc.org.uk/project_posts/the-difficulty-of-neoliberalism/. Last accessed: 07/02/19

Death, Carl. 2015. “Disrupting Global Governance: Protest at Environmental Conferences from 1972 to 2012.” Global Governance 21 (4): 579–98.

Democracy Now! 2015. “Thousands Defy Paris State of Emergency, Protest Ban to Sound the Alarm on Global Climate Crisis.” https://www.democracynow.org/2015/11/30/thousands_defy_paris_state_of_emergency Last accessed: 08/18/19

Democracy Now! 2017. “Special Report: Revolt at Trump’s Pro-Coal, Pro-Nuclear, and Pro-Gas Panel Rocks U.N. Climate Summit.” https://www.democracynow.org/2017/11/14/special_report_revolt_at_trumps_pro Last accessed: 07/26/19

Derrida, Jacques. 2009. The Beast & The Sovereign. Volume 1. University of Chicago Press.

Dietz, Matthias, and Heiko Garrelts, eds. 2014. Routledge Handbook of the Climate Change Movement. Routledge.

Dobson, Andrew, and Derek Bell, eds. 2005. Environmental Citizenship. MIT Press.

Dobson, Andrew, and Robyn Eckersley, eds. 2006. Political Theory and the Ecological Challenge. Cambridge University Press.

298

Dryzek, John. 2013. The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses. Third Ed. MIT Press.

Eckersley, Robyn. 2004. The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty. MIT Press.

Edelman, Marc, Tony Weis, Amita Baviskar, Saturnino M. Borras Jr, Eric Holt-Giménez, Denis Kandiyoti, and Wendy Wolford. 2014. “Introduction: Critical Perspectives on Food Sovereignty.” Journal of Peasant Studies 41 (6): 911–31.

Edwards, Jason. 2010. “The Materialism in Historical Materialism.” In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 281–98. Duke University Press.

EDF. 2016. "Paris Agreement enters into force in record time, marking continued global momentum on climate action." Environmental Defense Fund statement from Nathaniel Keohane, Vice President, Global Climate. https://www.edf.org/media/paris-agreement- enters-force-record-time-marking-continued-global-momentum-climate-action Last accessed: 03/13/19

Ehrlich, Paul R. 1968. The Population Bomb. Ballantine Books. http://www.arcliive.org/details/populationbomOOelirl.

Ekers, Michael, and Alex Loftus. 2012. “Revitalizing the Production of Nature Thesis: A Gramscian Turn?” Progress in Human Geography 37 (2): 234–52.

Ekers, Michael, Gillian Hart, Stefan Kipfer, and Alex Loftus, eds. 2013. Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics. Wiley-Blackwell.

Elbe, Ingo. 2013. “Between Marx, Marxism, and Marxisms – Ways of Reading Marx ’s Theory.” Viewpoint Magazine. https://www.viewpointmag.com/2013/10/21/between- marx-marxism-and-marxisms-ways-of-reading-marxs-theory/ Last accessed: 07/22/19

Elkerbout, Milan. 2017. “An American in Bonn: A Tale of Two Delegations at COP23.” CEPS. https://www.ceps.eu/ceps-publications/american-bonn-tale-two-delegations- cop23/ Last accessed: 06/27/19

Ellis, Elisabeth. 2016. “Democracy as Constraint and Possibility for Environmental Action.” In The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory, edited by Teena Gabrielson, Cheryl Hall, John M. Meyer, and David Schlosberg, 505–19. Oxford University Press.

Elson, Diane, ed. 2015. Value: The Representation of Labor in Capitalism. Verso.

299

Evans, Simon. 2016. “The Past, Present, and Future of Germany’s Energiewende.” Carbon Brief. https://www.carbonbrief.org/timeline-past-present-future-germany- energiewende Last accessed: 07/28/19

Fay, Margaret A. 1978. “Did Marx Offer to Dedicate Capital to Darwin?: A Reassessment of the Evidence.” Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1): 133–46.

Featherstone, David. 2013. “The Contested Politics of Climate Change and the Crisis of Neo-Liberalism.” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 12 (1): 44–64.

Felli, Romain. 2014. “On Climate Rent.” Historical Materialism 22 (3–4): 251–80.

Femia, Joseph. 2005. “Gramsci, Machiavelli and International Relations.” Political Quarterly 76 (3): 341–49.

Finnegan, Conor and Stephanie Ebbs. 2017. “A Tale of 2 US Delegations at Climate Talks.” ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/tale-us-delegations-climate- talks/story?id=51101699 Last accessed: 07/26/19

Fisher, Dana R. 2010. “COP-15 in Copenhagen: How the Merging of Movements Left Civil Society Out in the Cold.” Global Environmental Politics 10 (2): 11–17.

Fisher, Dana R., and William R. Freudenburg. 2001. “Ecological Modernization and Its Critics: Assessing the Past and Looking Toward the Future.” Society and Natural Resources 14 (8): 701–9.

Fontana, Benedetto. 2013. "The Concept of Nature in Gramsci." in Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics. Edited by Michael Ekers, Gillian Hart, Stefan Kipfer, and Alex Loftus. Wiley-Blackwell. pp 123-141.

Foran, John. 2014. “‘¡Volveremos! / We Will Return’: The State of Play for the Global Climate Justice Movement.” Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements 6 (1): 454–77.

Foster, John Bellamy, Brett Clark, and Richard York. 2010. The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth. Monthly Review Press.

Foucault, Michel. 2003[1976]. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976. Picador.

Gardiner, Stephen M. 2011. A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change. Oxford University Press.

300

Garrelts, Heiko, and Matthias Dietz. 2014. “Introduction: Countours of the Transnational Climate Movement - Conception and Contents of the Handbook.” In Routledge Handbook of the Climate Change Movement, edited by Matthias Dietz and Heiko Garrelts, 1–16. Routledge.

Gellert, Paul K. 2019. "Bunker's Ecologically Unequal Exchange, Foster's Metabolic Rift, and Moore's World-Ecology: Distinctions With or Without a Difference?" In Ecologically Unequal Exchange: Environmental Injustice in Comparative and Historical Perspective. Edited by R. Scott Frey, Paul K. Dellert, and Harry F. Dahms. Palgrave Macmillan.

Gerstenberger, Heide. 2011. “The Historical Constitution of the Political Forms of Capitalism.” Antipode 43 (1): 60–86.

Goeminne, Gert. 2012. “Lost in Translation: Climate Denial and the Return of the Political.” Global Environmental Politics 12 (2): 1–8.

Goldenberg, Suzanne, John Vidal, Lenore Taylor, Adam Vaughan, and Fiona Harvey. 2015. “Paris climate deal: nearly 200 nations sign in end of fossil fuel era.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/12/paris-climate-deal- 200-nations-sign-finish-fossil-fuel-era Last accessed: 03/25/19

Graham, Erin R., and Alexander Thompson. 2015. “Efficient Orchestration? The Global Environment Facility in the Governance of Climate Adaptation.” In International Organizations as Orchestrators, edited by Kenneth W. Abbott, Philipp Genschel, Duncan Snidal, and Bernhard Zangl, 114–38. Cambridge University Press.

Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith.

Gramsci, Antonio. 1999. Further Selections From the Prison Notebooks. Edited by Derek Boothman. The Electric Book Company.

Gramsci, Antonio. 2000. The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935. Edited by David Forgacs. New York University Press.

Green, Jessica F., and Thomas N. Hale. 2017. “Reversing the Marginalization of Global Environmental Politics in International Relations: An Opportunity for the Discipline.” PS: Political Science & Politics 50 (02): 473–79.

301

Grundig, Frank. 2006. “Patterns of International Cooperation and the Explanatory Power of Relative Gains: An Analysis of Cooperation on Global Climate Change, Ozone Depletion, and International Trade.” International Studies Quarterly 50 (4): 781–801.

Guardian, The. 2018. “How the UN climate panel go to 1.5C threshold – timeline.” Last modified on 10/07/18. Link broken. Last accessed: 10/10/18

Gupta, Joyeeta. 2002. “Global Sustainable Development Governance: Institutional Challenges from a Theoretical Perspective.” International Environmental Agreements 2 (4): 361–88.

Gupta, Joyeeta. 2014. The History of Global Climate Governance. Cambridge University Press.

Hadden, Jennifer. 2015. Networks in Contention: The Divisive Politics of Climate Change. Cambridge University Press.

Haeringer, Nicolas, and Tadzio Mueller. 2016. “Election of Trump Clarifies the Struggle for Climate Justice.” New Internationalist, 1–10. https://newint.org/blog/2016/11/11/election-of-trump-clarifies-the-struggle-for-climate- justice/ Last accessed: 07/22/19

Hale, Charles R., ed. 2008. Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship. University of California Press.

Hale, Thomas. 2016. “‘All Hands on Deck’: The Paris Agreement and Nonstate Climate Action.” Global Environmental Politics 16 (3): 12–22.

Hamati-Ataya, Inanna. 2013. “Reflectivity, Reflexivity, Reflexivism: IR’s ‘reflexive Turn’ - and Beyond.” European Journal of International Relations 19 (4): 669–94.

Hamouchene, Hamza. 2016a. “The Ouarzazate Solar Plant in Morocco: Triumphal ‘Green’ Capitalism and the Privatization of Nature.” Pambazuka News. http://www.pambazuka.org/global-south/ouarzazate-solar-plant-morocco-triumphal- green-capitalism-and-privatization-nature. Last accessed: 07/24/19

Hamouchene, Hamza. 2016b. “Fighting for Climate/environmental Justice in the Maghreb.” openDemocracy. https://www.opendemocracy.net/arab-awakening/hamza- hamouchene/fighting-for-climateenvironmental-justice-in-maghreb. Last accessed: 07/24/19

302

Hansen, James, Makiko Sato, Pushker Kharecha, Karina Von Schuckmann, David J Beerling, Junji Cao, Shaun Marcott, et al. 2016. “Young People’s Burden: Requirement of Negative CO 2 Emissions.” Earth System Dynamics Discussions October: 1–40.

Hardin, Garrett. 1968. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science 162 (3859): 1243–48.

Harris, Paul G. 2007. “Collective Action on Climate Change: The Logic of Regime Failure.” Natural Resources Journal 47: 195–224.

Harvey, David. 1974. “Population, Resources, and the Ideology of Science.” Economic Geography 50 (3): 256–77.

Harvey, David. 1996. Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. Blackwell.

Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press.

Harvey, David. 2006[1982]. The Limits to Capital. Verso.

Harvey, David. 2010. A Companion to Marx’s Capital. Verso.

Harvey, Fiona. 2015. “Paris Climate Change Agreement: The World’s Greatest Diplomatic Success.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/13/paris-climate-deal-cop- diplomacy-developing-united-nations

Hawken, Paul, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins. 1999. Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution. Little, Brown and Company.

Hayns, Joe. 2016. “COP22’s Imperialist Environmentalism.” Jacobin. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/cop22-morocco-environmentalism-colonialism/

Heinrich, Michael. 2006[2002]. “A Thing with Transcendental Qualities: Money as a Social Relationship in Capitalism.” MR Online. https://mronline.org/2006/11/03/a-thing- with-transcendental-qualities-money-as-a-social-relationship-in-capitalism/ Last accessed: 07/22/19

Heinrich, Michael. 2012[2004]. An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital. Monthly Review Press.

Heinrich, Michael. 2015. “‘Je Ne Suis Pas Marxiste.’” Libcom.org. 2015. https://libcom.org/files/Je ne suis pas marxiste.pdf Last accessed: 07/22/19

303

Held, David, Angus Hervey, and Marika Theros. 2011. The Governance of Climate Change: Science, Economics, Politics & Ethics. Polity.

Held, David, Charles Roger, and Eva-Maria Nag, eds. 2013. Climate Governance in the Developing World. Polity.

Henderson, George. 2004. “Value: The Many-Headed Hydra.” Antipode 36 (3): 445-460.

Henderson, George. 2009. "Marxist Political Economy and the Environment." In A Companion to Environmental Geography, edited by Noel Castree, David Demeritt, Diana Liverman, and Bruce Rhoads. Blackwell.

Hobbes, Thomas. 1994. Leviathan: With Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668. Edited by Edwin Curley. Hackett.

Hobsbawm, Eric J. 2000. "Introduction" to The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916- 1935. Edited by David Forgacs. New York University Press. pgs. 10-14.

Hopf, Ted. 2010. “The Logic of Habit in International Relations.” European Journal of International Relations 16 (4): 539–61.

IPCC. 2014a. Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Core Writing Team, R.K. Pachauri and L.A. Meyer (eds.)]. IPCC, Geneva, Switzerland, 151 pp.

IPCC. 2014b. “IPCC: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Accelerate despite Reduction Efforts,” no. 2014/19/PR: 1–3. Available at: http://www.mejudice.nl/docs/default- source/download/20140413_pr_pc_wg3_en.pdf Last accessed: 07/29/19

IPCC. 2018. Global Warming of 1.5 °C an IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty. [SR-15] http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/ Last accessed: 07/22/19

Ives, Peter, and Nicola Short. 2013. “On Gramsci and the International: A Textual Analysis.” Review of International Studies, no. February: 1–22.

Jacobs, Michael. 2016. “High pressure for low emissions: How civil society created the Paris climate agreement.” Juncture 22 (04). https://www.ippr.org/juncture/high-pressure- for-low-emissions-how-civil-society-created-the-paris-climate-agreement Last accessed: 03/23/19

304

Jamieson, Dale. 2011. “The Nature of the Problem.” In The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society. John Dryzek, Richard B. Norgaard, and David Schlosberg, eds. Oxford University Press. pp 38-54.

Jamieson, Dale. 2014. Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed--and what it Means for Our Future. Oxford University Press.

Javeline, Debra. 2014. “The Most Important Topic Political Scientists Are Not Studying: Adapting to Climate Change.” Perspectives on Politics 12 (02): 420–34.

Jessop, Bob. 2012. “Economic and Ecological Crises: Green New Deals and No-Growth Economies.” Development 55 (1): 17–24.

Jessop, Bob. 2016. The State: Past, Present, Future. Polity.

Johnston, Ian. 2016. “Global Economy Could ‘Self-Destruct’ If World Carries on Burning Fossil Fuels, Leading Economist Warns.” The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/global-economy-self-destruct-nicholas- stern-fossil-fuels-sustainable-infrastructure-report-a7347211.html Last accessed 07/22/19.

Kahan, Dan M. 2012. “Why We Are Poles Apart on Climate Change.” Nature 488 (7411): 255–255.

Kapiszewski, Diana, Lauren M. MacLean, and Benjamin L. Read. 2015. Field Research in Political Science. Cambridge University Press.

Karatani, Kojin. 2003. Transcritique. Duke University Press.

Karatani, Kojin. 2014. The Structure of World History. Duke University Press.

Karatani, Kojin. 2018. “Neoliberalism as a Historical Stage.” Global Discourse 8 (2): 191–207.

Katz, Cindi. 1998. “Whose Nature, Whose Culture? Private Productions of Space and the ‘Preservation’ of Nature.” In Remaking Reality: Nature at the Milennium. Noel Castree and Bruce Braun, eds. Routledge. pp 45-62.

Keating, Dave. 2017a. “COP23: US absence felt on first day of UN climate summit.” DW. https://www.dw.com/en/cop23-us-absence-felt-on-first-day-of-un-climate-summit/a- 41262516 Last accessed: 06/27/19

305

Keating, Dave. 2017b. “COP23: Rival US delegation opens pavilion to challenge Trump.” DW. https://www.dw.com/en/cop23-rival-us-delegation-opens-pavilion-to- challenge-trump/a-41318035 Last accessed: 06/27/19

Keating, Dave. 2017c. “There Are Two Rival U.S. Delegations at the Bonn Climate Summit. Which One Speaks for America?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/davekeating/2017/11/06/there-are-two-rival-u-s- delegations-at-the-bonn-climate-summit-which-one-speaks-for-america/#60814de91e96 Last accessed: 07/26/19

Keating, Dave. 2017d. “The White House Tried to Host a Pro-Coal Event at a Climate Summit. It Didn’t Go Well.” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/davekeating/2017/11/13/the-us-government-tried-to-host-a- pro-coal-event-at-the-bonn-climate-summit-it-didnt-go-well/#521520fd2eae Last accessed: 07/26/19

Keck, Margaret, and Kathryn Sikkink. 1998. Activists beyond Borders: Transnational Activist Networks in International Politics. Cornell University Press.

Kenis, Anneleen, and Matthias Lievens. 2014. “Searching for ‘the Political’ in Environmental Politics.” Environmental Politics 23 (4): 531–48.

Kenis, Anneleen, and Erik Mathijs. 2014. “Climate Change and Post-Politics: Repoliticizing the Present by Imagining the Future?” Geoforum 52: 148–56.

Keohane, Robert O., and David G. Victor. 2011. “The Regime Complex for Climate Change.” Perspectives on Politics 9 (1): 7–23.

Keohane, Robert O., and David G. Victor. 2016. “Cooperation and Discord in Global Climate Policy.” Nature Climate Change 6 (6): 570–75.

Klein, Naomi. 2014. This Changes Everything. Alfred A. Knopf.

Kolbert, Elizabeth. 2014. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Henry Holt and Company.

Krebs, Ronald R., and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson. 2007. “Twisting Tongues and Twisting Arms: The Power of Political Rhetoric.” European Journal of International Relations 13 (1): 35–66.

Kuyper, Jonathan W., and Karin Bäckstrand. 2016. “Accountability and Representation: Nonstate Actors in UN Climate Diplomacy.” Global Environmental Politics 16 (2): 61– 81.

306

Kütting, Gabriela. 2004. “Globalization and the Environment: Moving Beyond Neoliberal Institutionalism.” International Journal of Peace Studies 9 (1).

Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Verso.

Lange, Elena Louisa. 2015. “Exchanging without Exploiting.” Historical Materialism 23 (3): 171–200.

Larner, Wendy. 2000. “Neo-Liberalism: Policy, Ideology, Governmentality.” Studies in Political Economy 63: 5–25.

Larner, Wendy, and William Walters. 2004. “Globalization as Governmentality.” Alternatives 29 (5): 495–514.

LDC Group. 2015. “Unprecedented climate agreement is ‘best outcome for all.’” http://www.ldc-climate.org/press_release/unprecedented-climate-agreement-is-best- outcome-for-all/ Last accessed: 03/26/19

Leitner, Helga, Jamie Peck, and Eric S. Sheppard, eds. 2007. Contesting Neoliberalism. The Guilford Press.

Lemle, Kyle. 2017. “Why I Helped Organize the Singing Revolt Against the White House at the UN Climate Talks.” TruthOut. https://truthout.org/articles/why-i-helped- organize-the-singing-revolt-against-the-white-house-at-the-un-climate-talks/ Last accessed: 07/26/19

Levin, Kelly, Benjamin Cashore, Steven Bernstein, and Graeme Auld. 2012. “Overcoming the Tragedy of Super Wicked Problems: Constraining Our Future Selves to Ameliorate Global Climate Change.” Policy Sciences 45 (2): 123–52.

Levy, David L., and Daniel Egan. 2003. “A Neo-Gramscian Approach to Corporate Political Strategy: Conflict and Accommodation in the Climate Change Negotiations.” Journal of Management Studies 40 (4): 803–29.

Lewis, Simon L., and Mark A. Maslin. 2015. “Defining the Anthropocene.” Nature 519 (7542): 171–80.

Li, Minqi. 2009. “Capitalism, Climate Change and the Transition to Sustainability: Alternative Scenarios for the US, China and the World.” Development and Change 40 (6): 1039–61.

307

Li, Minqi. 2011. “The 21st Century Crisis: Climate Catastrophe or Socialism.” Review of Radical Political Economics 43 (3): 289–301.

Li, Minqi. 2013. “Climate Change, Limits to Growth, and the Imperative for Socialism.” Monthly Review 60 (3): 51.

Li, Minqi. 2014. Peak Oil, Climate Change, and the Limits to China’s Economic Growth. Routledge.

Li, Minqi. 2017. “Barbarism or Socialism: 1917-2017-2050 (?).” Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 6 (2): 263–86.

Lovins, Amory. 2011. The Essential Amory Lovins. Edited by Cameron M. Burns. Routledge.

Lövbrand, Eva, Johannes Stripple, and Bo Wiman. 2009. “Earth System Governmentality. Reflections on Science in the Anthropocene.” Global Environmental Change 19 (1): 7–13.

Luterbacher, Urs, and Detlef F. Sprinz, eds. 2001. International Relations and Global Climate Change. MIT Press.

Machin, Amanda. 2013. Negotiating Climate Change: Radical Democracy and the Illusion of Consensus. Zed Books.

Magdoff, Fred and John Bellamy Foster. 2010. “What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism.” Monthly Review 61 (10). https://monthlyreview.org/2010/03/01/what-every-environmentalist-needs-to-know- about-capitalism/ Last accessed: 07/22/19

Malay Mail. 2019. “Climate Campaigners ‘Greatest Threat’ to Oil Sector, Says OPEC.” https://www.malaymail.com/news/money/2019/07/03/climate-campaigners-greatest- threat-to-oil-sector-says-opec/1768003 Last accessed: 07/29/19

Malm, Andreas. 2015. “The Anthropocene Myth.” Jacobin. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/anthropocene-capitalism-climate-change/

Malm, Andreas. 2016. Fossil Capital. Verso.

Malm, Andreas, and Alf Hornborg. 2014. “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative.” The Anthropocene Review 1 (1): 62–69.

308

Mann, Geoff. 2009. “Should Political Ecology Be Marxist? A Case for Gramsci’s Historical Materialism.” Geoforum 40 (3): 335–44.

Mann, Geoff. 2013. “State of Confusion: Money and the Space of Civil Society in Hegel and Gramsci.” In Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics, edited by Michael Ekers, Gillian Hart, Stefan Kipfer, and Alex Loftus, 104–20. Wiley-Blackwell.

Mann, Geoff, and Joel Wainwright. 2018. Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future. Verso.

Martinez-Alier, Joan. 2012. “Environmental Justice and Economic Degrowth: An Alliance Between Two Movements.” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 23 (1): 51–73.

Martinez-Alier, Joan. 2014. “The Environmentalism of the Poor.” Geoforum 54: 239–41.

Martinez-Alier, Joan, Isabelle Anguelovski, Patrick Bond, Daniela Del Bene, Federico Demaria, Julien-Francois Gerber, Lucie Greyl, et al. 2014. “Between Activism and Science: Grassroots Concepts for Sustainability Coined by Environmental Justice Organizations.” Journal of Political Ecology 21 (1): 19.

Martinez-Alier, Joan, Leah Temper, Daniela del Bene, and Arnim Scheidel. 2016. “Is There a Global Environmental Justice Movement?” Journal of Peasant Studies, 1–25.

Marx, Karl. 1976[1863]. Capital. Vol. I. Penguin Books.

Marx, Karl. 1981[1894]. Capital. Vol. III. David Fernbach, trans. Penguin Books.

Marx, Karl. 1999[1894]. Capital. Vol. III. Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-III.pdf

Marx, Karl. 1996[1869]. “Critique of the Gotha Programme.” In Later Political Writings, edited by Terrell Carver, 208–26. Cambridge University Press.

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. 2010[1848]. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf Last accessed: 04/12/19

Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Justice. N.D. “Principles of Climate Justice.” https://www.mrfcj.org/principles-of-climate-justice/ Last accessed: 05/16/19.

309

Mason, Kelvin. 2013. “Academics and Social Movements: Knowing Our Place, Making Our Space.” Acme 12 (1): 23–43.

Mason, Kelvin, and Kye Askins. 2013. “COP15 and beyond: Politics, Protest and Climate Justice.” Acme 12 (1): 9–22.

Mathiesen, Karl. 2016. "Paris climate target slips away as Donald Trump rises." Climate Change News. https://www.climatechangenews.com/2016/11/17/paris-climate-target- slips-away-as-donald-trump-rises/ Last accessed: 03/14/19

McGregor, Ian. 2014. “Global Climate Change Policy: Will Paris Succeed Where Copenhagen Failed?” E-International Relations. https://www.e- ir.info/2014/11/05/global-climate-change-policy-will-paris-succeed-where-copenhagen- failed/ Last accessed: 02/26/19

Mertes, Tom, ed. 2004. A Movement of Movements: Is Another World Really Possible? Verso.

Michaelowa, Axel. 2015. “Opportunities for and Alternatives to Global Climate Regimes Post-Kyoto.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 40 (1): 395–417.

Mitchell, Ronald B. 2006. “Problem Structure, Institutional Design, and the Relative Effectiveness of International Environmental Agreements.” Global Environmental Politics 6 (3): 72–90.

Mitchell, Ronald B. 2013. “Oran Young and International Institutions.” International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics 13 (1): 1–14.

Mitchell, Timothy. 2011. Carbon Democracy. Verso.

Mitzen, Jennifer. 2006. “Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the Security Dilemma.” European Journal of International Relations 12 (3): 341–70.

Mol, Arthur P. J., and Gert Spaargaren. 2000. “Ecological Modernization Theory in Debate: A Review.” Environmental Politics 9 (1): 17–49.

Moolna, Adam. 2012. “Making Sense of CO2: Putting Carbon in Context.” Global Environmental Politics 12 (1): 1–8.

Moore, Jason W. 2003. “The Modern World-System as Environmental History? Ecology and the Rise of Capitalism.” Theory and Society 32 (3): 307–77.

310

Moore, Jason W. 2010. “‘Amsterdam Is Standing on Norway’ Part I: The Alchemy of Capital, Empire and Nature in the Diaspora of Silver, 1545-1648.” Journal of Agrarian Change 10 (1): 33–68.

Moore, Jason W. 2010. “‘Amsterdam Is Standing on Norway’ Part II: The Global North Atlantic in the Ecological Revolution of the Long Seventeenth Century.” Journal of Agrarian Change 10 (2): 188–227.

Moore, Jason W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life. Verso.

Moore, Jason W. 2017a. “The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 44 (3): 594–630.

Moore, Jason W. 2017b. “The Capitalocene Part II: Accumulation by Appropriation and the Centrality of Unpaid Work/Energy.” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 1–43.

Moore, Jason W. 2017. “Metabolic Rift or Metabolic Shift? Dialectics, Nature, and the World-Historical Method.” Theory and Society 46 (4): 285–318.

Moore, Jason W., ed. 2016. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. PM Press.

Morin, Jean-Frederic, and Amandine Orsini. 2013. “Insights from Global Environmental Governance.” International Studies Review 15: 562–89.

Morton, Adam. “The Two Americas at COP23.” The Interpreter. The Lowy Institute. https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/two-americas-cop23 Last accessed: 07/26/19

Mouffe, Chantal. 2005. On the Political. Routledge.

Mouffe, Chantal. 2013. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. Verso.

NCD Alliance. 2015 “COP21: Historic Climate Change Agreement Reached in Paris.” https://ncdalliance.org/news-events/news/cop21-historic-climate-change-agreement- reached-in-paris Last accessed: 02/26/19

Neumann, Iver B. 2014. “International Relations as a Social Science.” Millennium - Journal of International Studies 43 (1): 330–50.

Newell, Peter, and David Levy. 2002. “Business Strategy and International Environmental Governance: Toward a Neo-Gramscian Synthesis.” Global Environmental Politics 2 (4): 84–101.

311

Newell, Peter, Philipp Pattberg, and Heike Schroeder. 2012. “Multiactor Governance and the Environment.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 37 (1): 365–87.

Nisbet, Matthew C., and Declan Fahy. 2015. “The Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism in Politicized Science Debates.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 658 (1): 223–34.

Nolan, Peter. 2019. “The CPC and The Ancien Regime.” New Left Review 115: 17-28.

O’Connor, James. 1996. “The Second Contradiction of Capitalism.” In The Greening of Marxism, edited by Ted Benton, 197–221. The Guilford Press.

Oil Change International. 2016. “The Sky’s Limit. Why The Paris Climate Goals Require a Managed Decline of Fossil Fuel Production.” http://priceofoil.org/2016/09/22/the-skys- limit-report/ Accessed 02/07/17.

Okereke, Chukwumerije, Harriet Bulkeley, and Heike Schroeder. 2009. “Conceptualizing Climate Governance.” Global Environmental Politics 9 (1): 58–78.

Ollman, Bertell. 2000. “What Is Political Science? What Should It Be?” New Political Science 22 (4): 553–62.

Paterson, Matthew, David Humphreys, and Lloyd Pettiford. 2003. “Conceptualizing Global Environmental Governance: From Interstate Regimes to Counter-Hegemonic Struggles.” Global Environmental Politics 3 (2): 1–10.

Pengelly, Martin. 2015. “Obama praises Paris climate deal as ‘tribute to American leadership.’” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/12/obama- speech-paris-climate-change-talks-deal-american-leadership Last accessed: 03/25/19

Pepermans, Yves, and Pieter Maeseele. 2016. “The Politicization of Climate Change: Problem or Solution?” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 7: 478–85.

Petrovic, Gajo. 1983. “Praxis.” In A Dictionary of Marxist Thought. Edited by Tom Bottomore. Harvard University Press.

Poulantzas, Nicos. 2008. The Poulantzas Reader. Edited by James Martin. Verso.

Poulantzas, Nicos. 2014[1978]. State, Power, Socialism. Verso.

Proyect, Louis. 2016. “Review of Jason Moore’s ‘Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital.” https://louisproyect.org/2016/10/10/jason-moores-

312 capitalism-in-the-web-of-life-ecology-and-the-accumulation-of-capital/ Last accessed: 07/22/19

Pusey, Andre, and Bertie Russell. 2010. “The Climate Crisis or the Crisis of Climate Politics?” Perspectives on Anarchist Theory 12 (2): 26–47.

Radkau, Joachim. 2008. Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment. Cambridge University Press.

Reitan, Ruth, and Shannon Gibson. 2012. “Climate Change or Social Change? Environmental and Leftist Praxis and Participatory Action Research.” Globalizations 9 (3): 395–410.

Rietig, Katharina. 2016. “The Power of Strategy: Environmental NGO Influence in International Climate Negotiations.” Global Governance 22 (2): 269–88.

Rising Tide North America. 2010. “The Climate Movement is Dead, Long Live the Climate Movement.” https://risingtidenorthamerica.org/publications/the-climate- movement-is-dead-long-live-the-climate-movement/ Last accessed: 08/18/19

Ritzer, George, ed. 2013. The Blackwell Companion to Globalization. Blackwell.

Robertson, Morgan M, and Joel D Wainwright. 2013. “The Value of Nature to the State.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103 (4): 890–905.

Robbins, Paul. 2014. “Cries along the Chain of Accumulation.” Geoforum 54. Elsevier Ltd: 233–35.

Robbins, Paul, John Hintz, and Sarah A. Moore. 2014. Environment and Society: A Critical Introduction. Second Ed. Wiley-Blackwell. Russell, Bertie. 2015. “Beyond Activism/Academia: Militant Research and the Radical Climate and Climate Justice Movement(S).” Area 47 (3): 222–29.

Rosenau, James N. 1992. “Governance, Order, and Change in World Politics.” In Governance Without Government: Order and Change in World Politics, edited by James N. Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel, 1–29. Cambridge University Press.

Rupert, Mark. 2003. “Globalising Common Sense : Marxian-Gramscian (Re-)Vision of the Politics of Governance/Resistance.” Review of International Studies 29 (December): 181–98.

313

Rupert, Mark. 2005. “Class Powers and the Politics of Global Governance.” In Power in Global Governance, edited by Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, 205–28. Cambridge University Press.

Rupert, Mark, and Hazel Smith, eds. 2002. Historical Materialism and Globalization. Routledge.

Russell, Bertie, Andre Pusey, and Paul Chatterton. 2011. “What Can an Assemblage Do.” City 15 (5): 577–83.

Saad-Filho, Alfredo, and Deborah Johnston, eds. 2005. Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader. Pluto Press.

Salerno, Salvatore. 2014. “Introduction.” In Direct Action & Sabotage: Three Classic IWW Pamphlets from the 1910s, edited by Salvatore Salerno, 1-26. PM Press.

Sayer, Derek. 1987. The Violence of Abstraction. Basil Blackwell.

Schlosberg, David. 2007. Defining Environmental Justice. Oxford University Press.

Schlosberg, David, and Lisette B. Collins. 2014. “From Environmental to Climate Justice: Climate Change and the Discourse of Environmental Justice.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 5 (3): 359–74.

Schmidt, Alfred. 2014[1962]. The Concept of Nature in Marx. Verso.

Schmitt, Carl. 2005[1922]. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. University of Chicago Press.

Schmitt, Carl. 2007[1932]. The Concept of the Political. Expanded Edition. University of Chicago Press.

Schmitt, Carl. 2008. The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes. University of Chicago Press.

Schroeder, Heike, and Heather Lovell. 2012. “The Role of Non-Nation-State Actors and Side Events in the International Climate Negotiations.” Climate Policy 12: 23–37.

Sclofsky, Sebastián, and Kevin Funk. 2017. “The Specter That Haunts Political Science: The Neglect and Misreading of Marx in International Relations and Comparative Politics.” International Studies Perspectives, no. October: 1–23.

314

Scott, James C. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Yale University Press.

Scranton, Roy. 2015. Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene. City Lights Books.

Selin, Henrik and Adil Najam. 2015. “Paris Agreement on Climate Change: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” https://theconversation.com/paris-agreement-on-climate-change- the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-52242 Last accessed: 02/26/19

Shahid, Waleed. 2016. “American in Populist Times: An Interview With Chantal Mouffe.” The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/america-in-populist-times-an- interview-with-chantal-mouffe/ Last accessed: 07/28/19

Smith, Neil. 2008[1984]. Uneven Development. Blackwell.

Smith, Mick. 2011. Against Ecological Sovereignty: Ethics, Biopolitics, and Saving the Natural World. University of Minnesota Press.

Solomon, Joe. 2015. “The Rise, Fall, and Return of 1.5°C in the Global Climate Negotiations.” Common Dreams. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/10/21/rise-fall-and-return-15degc-global- climate-negotiations Last accessed: 03/21/19

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2016[1976]. “Translator’s Preface” to Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida. 40th Anniversary Edition. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Steffen, Will. 2011. “A Truly Complex and Diabolical Policy Problem.” In The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society. John Dryzek, Richard B. Norgaard, and David Schlosberg, eds. Oxford University Press. pp 21-37.

Steffen, Will, Paul J Crutzen, and John R Mcneill. 2007. “The Anthropocene : Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Ambio 36 (8): 614–21.

Steffen, Will, Åsa Persson, Lisa Deutsch, Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams, Katherine Richardson, Carole Crumley, et al. 2011. “The Anthropocene: From Global Change to Planetary Stewardship.” Ambio 40 (7): 739–61.

Steger, Manfred B. 2003. Globalization: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

Steger, Manfred B., and Ravi K. Roy. 2010. Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

315

Stephan, Benjamin, and Richard Lane, eds. 2015. The Politics of Carbon Markets. Routledge.

Stephen, Matthew. 2011. “Globalisation and Resistance: Struggles over Common Sense in the Global Political Economy.” Review of International Studies 37 (1): 209–28.

Stevenson, Hayley, and John Dryzek. 2012. “The Discursive Democratisation of Global Climate Governance.” Environmental Politics 21 (2): 189–210.

Stevenson, Hayley, and John S. Dryzek. 2014. Democratizing Global Climate Governance. Cambridge University Press.

Surprise, Kevin. 2016. Preempting the Second Contradiction: The Political Economy of Solar Geoengineering. PhD diss., Clark University.

Surprise, Kevin. 2018. “Preempting the Second Contradiction: Solar Geoengineering as Spatiotemporal Fix.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 108 (5): 1228– 44.

Swyngedouw, Erik. 2010. “Apocalypse Forever? Post-Political Populism and the Spectre of Climate Change.” Theory, Culture & Society 27 (2–3): 213–32.

Swyngedouw, Erik. 2011. “Depoliticized Environments: The End of Nature, Climate Change and the Post-Political Condition.” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 69: 253–74.

Taylor, Lenore and Tania Branigan. 2014. "US and China strike deal on carbon cuts in push for global climate change pact." The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/nov/12/china-and-us-make-carbon- pledge Last accessed: 03/13/19

Teschke, Benno. 2003. The Myth of 1648. Verso.

Thomas, Peter D. 2009a. The Gramscian Moment. Brill.

Thomas, Peter. 2009b. “Gramsci and the Political: From the State as ‘Metaphysical Event’ to Hegemony as ‘Philosophical Fact.’” Radical Philosophy 153 (153): 27–36.

Thompson, Alexander. 2006. “Management Under Anarchy: The International Politics of Climate Change.” Climatic Change 78 (1): 7–29.

316

Thompson, Alexander. 2010. “Rational Design in Motion: Uncertainty and Flexibility in the Global Climate Regime.” European Journal of International Relations 16 (2): 269– 96.

Thompson, Alexander, and Daniel Verdier. 2014. “Multilateralism, Bilateralism, and Regime Design.” International Studies Quarterly 58 (1): 15–28. https://doi.org/10.1111/isqu.12100.

Thunberg, Greta. 2019a. No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference. Penguin Books.

Thunberg, Greta. 2019b. “Greta Thunberg: ‘They See Us As a Threat Because We’re Having an Impact.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/jul/21/great-thunberg-you-ask-the-questions- see-us-as-a-threat Last accessed: 07/29/19

Tienhaara, Kyla. 2014. “Varieties of Green Capitalism: Economy and Environment in the Wake of the Global Financial Crisis.” Environmental Politics 23 (2): 187–204.

Times of India. 2015. “PM Narendra Modi on Paris Deal: Climate justice won.” https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/PM-Narendra-Modi-on-Paris-deal-Climate- justice-won/articleshow/50159914.cms Last accessed: 03/26/19

Timperley, Jocelyn. 2017. “The Carbon Brief Interview: Amory Lovins.” Carbon Brief. https://www.carbonbrief.org/carbon-brief-interview-amory-lovins Last accessed: 07/28/19

Trautmann, William E. 2014[1912]. “Direct Action and Sabotage.” In Direct Action & Sabotage: Three Classic IWW Pamphlets from the 1910s, edited by Salvatore Salerno, 27-57. PM Press.

Trembath, Alex. 2015. “Ecomodernism: A Third Way.” The Breakthrough Institute. https://thebreakthrough.org/articles/ecomodernism-a-third-way Last accessed: 07/28/19

Tsing, Anna. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press.

UN. 1992. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. https://unfccc.int/resource/docs/convkp/conveng.pdf Last accessed: 07/24/19

UNFCCC. N.D. “What is the Kyoto Protocol?” https://unfccc.int/process-and- meetings/the-kyoto-protocol/what-is-the-kyoto-protocol Last accessed: 03/20/19

317

UNFCCC. 2011. “Non-Governmental Organization Constituencies.” https://unfccc.int/files/parties_and_observers/ngo/application/pdf/constituency_2011_eng lish.pdf

UNFCCC. 2016. Report of the Conference of the Parties on its Twenty-first Session, Held in Paris from 30 November to 13 December 2015. (No. FCCC/CP/2015/10/Add.1) https://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2015/cop21/eng/10a01.pdf Last accessed: 01/28/19

US House of Representatives. 2019. H.Res.109 - Recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal. https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th- congress/house-resolution/109/text Last accessed: 08/18/19

US Senate. 1997. S. Res. 98 [Report No. 105-54] Expressing the sense of the Senate regarding the conditions for the United States becoming a signatory to any international agreement on greenhouse gas emissions under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. https://www.congress.gov/105/bills/sres98/BILLS- 105sres98ats.pdf Last accessed: 07/16/19

Valdez, Inés. 2019. Transnational Cosmopolitanism: Kant, Du Bois, and Justice as a Political Craft. Cambridge University Press.

Vanderheiden, Steve. 2008. Atmospheric Justice: A Political Theory of Climate Change. Oxford University Press.

Vansintjan, Aaron. 2015. “The Anthropocene Debate: Why is such a useful concept starting to fall apart?” Uneven Earth http://www.unevenearth.org/?p=684 Last accessed: 06/23/19

Vidal, John. 2016. "'There's no plan B': climate change scientists fear consequence of Trump victory." The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/12/climate-change- marrakech-no-plan-b--trump-victory Last accessed: 03/14/19

Vidal, John and Oliver Milman. 2016. "Paris climate deal thrown into uncertainty by US election result." The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/09/us-election-result- throws-paris-climate-deal-into-uncertainty Last accessed: 03/14/19

Vrasti, Wanda. 2008. “The Strange Case of Ethnography and International Relations.” Millennium - Journal of International Studies 37 (2): 279–301. von Storch, Hans. 2015. “Was the ‘failure’ of the Copenhagen climate summit key to expected ‘success’ in Paris?” Climate Matters. https://climatematters.blogs.uni-

318 hamburg.de/2015/12/was-the-failure-of-the-copenhagen-climate-summit-key-to- expected-success-in-paris/ Last accessed: 01/28/19

Vormedal, Irja. 2012. “States and Markets in Global Environmental Governance: The Role of Tipping Points in International Regime Formation.” European Journal of International Relations 18 (2): 251–75.

Wainwright, Joel. 2005a. “Politics of Nature: A Review of Three Recent Works by Bruno Latour.” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 16 (1): 115–22.

Wainwright, Joel. 2005b. “The Geographies of Political Ecology: After Edward Said.” Environment and Planning A 37 (6): 1033–43.

Wainwright, Joel. 2010a. “Climate Change, Capitalism, and the Challenge of Transdisciplinarity.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 100 (4): 983– 91.

Wainwright, Joel. 2010b. “On Gramsci’s ‘Conceptions of the World.’” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35: 507–21.

Wainwright, Joel. 2013. Geopiracy: Oaxaca, Militant Empiricism, and Geographical Thought. Palgrave Macmillan.

Wainwright, Joel, and Geoff Mann. 2015. “Climate Change and the Adaptation of the Political.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105 (2): 313–21.

Walker, R. B. J. 1993. Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory. Cambridge University Press.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2011[1974]. The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. University of California Press.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2004. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Duke University Press.

Waters, C. N., J. Zalasiewicz, C. Summerhayes, A. D. Barnosky, C. Poirier, A. Ga uszka, A. Cearreta, et al. 2016. “The Anthropocene Is Functionally and Stratigraphically Distinct from the Holocene.” Science 351 (6269).

Watson, Iain. 2014. “Green Growth, Neoliberalism and Conflicting Hegemonic Interests: The Case of Korea.” International Critical Thought 4 (1): 53–66.

319

Watts, Michael. 2003. "Political Ecology." In A Companion to Economic Geography. Eric Sheppard and Trevor Barnes, eds. Blackwell. pp 257-274.

Wendt, Alexander. 1999. Social Theory of International Politics. Cambridge University Press.

Wendt, Alexander. 2003. “Why a World State Is Inevitable.” European Journal of International Relations 9 (4): 491–542.

Wolf, Eric. 1972. “Ownership and Political Ecology.” Anthropological Quarterly 45 (3): 201–5.

Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the People Without History. University of California Press.

Wolford, Wendy. 2015. This Land Is Ours Now: Social Mobilization and the Meanings of Land in Brazil. Duke University Press.

Wood, Ellen Meiksins. 2002. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. Verso.

Young, Oran R. 1989. “The Politics of International Regime Formation: Managing Natural Resources and the Environment.” International Organization 43 (3): 349–75.

Young, Oran R. 2011. “Effectiveness of International Environmental Regimes: Existing Knowledge, Cutting-Edge Themes, and Research Strategies.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108 (50): 19853–60.

Young, Oran. 2012. “Regime Theory Thirty Years On: Taking Stock, Moving Forward.” E-International Relations. https://www.e-ir.info/2012/09/18/regime-theory-thirty-years- on-taking-stock-moving-forward/ Last accessed: 08/18/19

Yusoff, Kathryn. 2013. “Geologic Life: Prehistory, Climate, Futures in the Anthropocene.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31 (5): 779–95.

Zalasiewicz, Jan, et al. 2019. “What is the Anthropocene? - current definition and status.” Working Group on the Anthropocene, Subcommission on Quarternary Stratigraphy. http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/workinggroups/anthropocene/ Page last updated 21 May 2019. Last accessed: 07/29/19

Zelli, Fariborz. 2011. “The Fragmentation of the Global Climate Governance Architecture.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 2 (2): 255–70.

320

Zelli, Fariborz, and Harro van Asselt. 2013. “The Institutional Fragmentation of Global Environmental Governance: Causes, Consequences, and Responses.” Global Environmental Politics 13 (3): 1–13.

Zia, Asim, and Anne Marie Todd. 2010. “Evaluating the Effects of Ideology on Public Understanding of Climate Change Science: How to Improve Communication across Ideological Divides?” Public Understanding of Science 19 (6): 743–61.

Zürn, Michael. 1998. “The Rise of International Environmental Politics: A Review of Current Research.” World Politics 50 (4): 617–49.

321