The Rise of Ecofascism. Alex Roberts
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migration crises, chronic and acute food and water shortages, climate-related conflicts and the like. Each crisis will be encountered differently, each response will be, as the governance of crisis always is, complex and multifaceted, and often suddenly amplificatory of dormant social forms. It is in these unpredictable consequences of complex crises that the threat of the far right lies.
Mass far-right environmentalism will not be born from a vacuum. It would draw on the history of reactionary nature politics, which we call ‘far-right ecologism’. In the first part of this book, we trace the history of these ideas and practices, from colonial nature management to the rise of scientific racism and eugenics to the ‘green’ aspects of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany through to the postwar overpopulation discourse, currents of environmentalist misanthropy, and lastly the securitization of the environment itself. It is tempting to lump all historical manifestations of far-right environmentalism together. But this would be wrong. Although Umberto Eco noted that fascists are prone to understanding their own politics as a ‘singular truth, endlessly reinterpreted’,2 we should resist this tendency. The history we cover is episodic and disparate, although consistent patterns do emerge. Time and again we see ‘far-right ecologism’ as animated by the profound tension between capitalism’s expansionist dynamic, which often entails the destruction of parts of nature, and its continual production of social transformation. It is a history, therefore, not just of far-right ecologism’s ideas but also of capitalism’s nature–culture interface and its attendant crises.
And what this history shows is that far-right ecologism has been, by and large, intellectually parochial, concerned with nature in a curtailed and limited form. Its sense of nature has been flattened by fixation on particular species or a single place. If they have, like the environmentalist maxim, often ‘acted local’, they have rarely ‘thought global’. Nevertheless, such intellectual parochialism should not be underestimated: it has been capable, at times, of genocide.
Now, the overarching form of environmental crisis is anthropogenic climate systems breakdown. Chapters 2–4 turn to the various far-right responses to this crisis. Climate systems breakdown is no local problem, nor can it be resolved by force. The consequences of failure cannot easily be made to affect a particular othered group. It will not be solved by anything the far right has historically proposed. But nor is it irrelevant to far-right politics. Far-right politics has, since its inception, been intimately involved in the defence of capitalism, and the most important cause of climate systems breakdown – the continued extraction and use of fossil fuels – is, in the words of Andreas Malm, ‘not a sideshow to bourgeois democracy … it is the material form of contemporary capitalism’.3 Climate systems breakdown puts the structure of capitalism at risk and thus also the social order that the far right is committed to defend.
Faced with a crisis of such magnitude, the far right has diversified its nature politics once again, splintering into parts more or less accepting of the problem, more or less mystified, more or less ambivalent about the possible end of industrial modernity. There is no single far-right nature politics at the moment. Just as they have been throughout history, different actors are divided up by different ways of looking at the problem, various conceptions of what is and is not included in ‘nature’, profound disagreements about what the problem actually is, massive discrepancies in tactics, and conflict about long-term solutions to climate breakdown.
We have grouped them here according to their present political form: first, far-right parties and other parts of an emerging ‘environmental authoritarianism’; secondly, the younger far-right and fascist movements whose comparative agility, lack of interest in immediate electoral success and lack of connections to institutional power make them arguably more dangerous in the long term than the current electoral far right; and thirdly, the ‘ecofascist’ terrorists, the best known of whom carried out the Christchurch mosque attack, killing 51 Muslims. Each of these groupings has distinct aims, distinct political methods, their own internal tensions and, often, pronounced antagonisms with other parts of the far right. Just as in our previous book, Post-Internet Far Right, the far right is treated not as an aberrant force external to and preying on wider society, but as the most extreme part of a distribution, involved in a complicated dance with the rest of society.4
The effects of climate systems breakdown are already widespread. But like any exponential process without end, it is almost all in the future. It is to this future that the final chapter of the book turns. Here, we address what we call the ‘ecofascist hypothesis’: the widespread anxiety that our political future might be ‘ecofascism’. How are we to make sense of such a prediction?
We start with the future emergence of reactionary movements. In particular, we argue, the long history of climate change denialism on the right is likely to have unexpected, complicated effects on their future nature politics. Large numbers of people committed to mainstream right politics, most substantially in the US, have been lied to by those who denied climate change. When they confront this – and perhaps more importantly discover that in many cases this suppression of the truth imperils everything that their politics works to hold together – they are likely to radicalize, although, like all radicalization, it will be unpredictable. It is unlikely, we think, to generate a flood of new converts to the left. Two reactions here combine to make a particularly potent mix: a revolt against those who have got us into this mess and simultaneously an attempt to hold on to what some people already have, either as individuals or, more worryingly, as racial groups.
If it scales up beyond this movement stage to become a form of government, this future ‘ecofascism’ will have to address the more pronounced tension that has animated all forms of far-right ecologism to date: the tension between capitalism’s endless economic expansion and the affirmation and protection of the ‘natural order’. We outline two possible futures. In each, the far right serves as the (perhaps unruly) tool of a large fraction of capital. First, fossil capital, which allows the far right to continue its current broad commitments to climate change denial (we call it ‘Fossilized Reaction’). Secondly, it adheres to the interests of the security state and authoritarian capitalist interests more generally (we call this possible future ‘Batteries, Bombs and Borders’), which are involved in the geopolitically fraught process of securing the resources for a green energy transition and securing hegemony in a renewed era of superpower competition. Complicating both of these is the possible arrival of far-right groups of ‘climate collapse cults’.
Let us be clear about our target. The vast majority of current environmental movements and organizations are not on the far right. Nor are the concerns of environmental movements in some way ‘fascist’ concerns. It is not fascist to care about nature. Our conclusion turns to the responses we can make to such far-right movements, and about how we can act in ways impervious to far-right cooptation. Environmental movements must be politicized around issues of climate justice. Many, of course, already are. Yet, as environmental movements grow in importance, and the climate crisis becomes ever urgent, such movements will accumulate and jettison models of the world with increasing rapidity. And therein lies the risk. The political valence of environmentalism has changed before in the past. In the past, it was just as much an interest of the far right as of the left. It has the potential to flip again. Whatever the future, declarations that climate disruption will ‘push all utopian visions and ideological disputes into the background’5 or that people will likely retreat into a form of disengaged hedonism are clearly wrong. Climate systems breakdown will only get more intensely politicized from here.
Few books on the environment model transformations in politics as drastic as those outlined here. There are exceptions, notably Climate Leviathan. In it, Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright outline four hypothetical transformations of politics.6 Most similar to our outline of future ‘ecofascism’ is their ‘Climate Behemoth’, in which reactionary political actors oppose the globalization of politics but keep capitalism. Many parts of our accounts are similar, although we split it into two distinct parts. The second of these parts even has some similarities with their ‘Climate Leviathan’, which seeks planetary capitalist government. In our