The Rise of Ecofascism. Alex Roberts
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and destabilized social relations. One of the most pronounced tensions in fascist thought is, therefore, its ambivalence towards capitalism: it is the source of much that fascism finds appalling, and yet, as the real motor of the domination that fascism affirms, it cannot be entirely rejected. Fascism responds to this ambivalence with a normative racial vitalism: the dominance that capitalism affords is affirmed and naturalized while at the same time its destructiveness towards aspects of nature (and the social relations embedded in nature) is criticized. One effect of the colonial stage of capitalist development is affirmed, the other rejected. We will explore this contradictory response in greater depth in the following chapter.
Fascism in power made use of the authoritarian instruments that the state had accumulated during prior periods of crisis and colonial expansion.23 In doing so, it favoured the interests of the ruling classes. However, it also used these instruments to express its nature politics and attempt to live out nature’s diktats. The homogeneous notion of the people outlined above demands purification, both to destroy the organized working class and the nation’s supposed racial enemies. In its movement, party and state forms, fascism therefore tended towards violence.
It thus has an ideological aspect, a set of political techniques, a dependency on particular historical conditions, and an implicit class aspect, which only partially subsumes its other aspects.24 To restate: fascism is a political form that seeks to revolutionize and reharmonize the nation state through expelling a radically separate ‘Other’ by paramilitary means.
Ecofascism names one aspect of the wider fascist politics: that part which most emphatically tries to affirm its natural basis, whatever the contradictory results thereof. However, we don’t think ‘ecofascism’ is useful for describing any present political actor, except a few on the margins. The main reason is simply the declining utility of the term ‘fascism’. Each of the political forms mentioned in the definition of fascism above (independent mass associational forms, paramilitarism, state authoritarianism, racial politics) certainly exists in places around the globe at the moment, but in each instance, they are only partially coordinated. In many places, their interests are opposed. Of course, this need not be the case forever. The last chapter of this book is an exploration of ecofascism’s potential re-emergence through the climate crisis, but perhaps the main purpose of the book as a whole is to convert popular worry about ‘ecofascism’ into more clear-eyed opposition to the forms of racialized power that are wielded over and through the environment, be they ‘fascist’ or not.
If most of what we discuss is not ‘ecofascism’, then what is it? Other terms have been suggested, such as Jonathan Olsen’s ‘right-wing ecology’, which contains three parts: eco-naturalism (nature as the blueprint for social order), eco-organicism (nature and society viewed as an organism) and eco-authoritarianism (illiberal politics as the best solution to the environmental crises) as its foundational elements.25 As others have argued, Olsen’s focus on Germany makes it difficult for us to extrapolate this to other contexts.26 ‘Far-right ecologism’ has also been used to suggest a link between the natural imaginary of the far right and its social imaginary.27
We also use ‘far-right ecologism’ in this book, although our definition is slightly different. As with our definition of ‘ecofascism’, we must take a step back and answer another question. What is politics? Politics is the struggle to produce or reproduce a set of social roles and relations. Our definition of ‘far right’ locates a particular position within this struggle. More a taxonomic family than a species, we define it as ‘those forms of political behaviour which work on or advocate for the reproduction of capitalist social roles and relations on the basis of ethnic nationalism, racism, xenophobia or antisemitism, often through the application of violent means at odds with principles of formal equality and thus at least publicly unavailable to the liberal state’. Because of its generality, ‘the far right’ doesn’t have one particular organizing form.
‘Far-right ecologism’ names all manner of highly variegated attempts to produce or reproduce racial hierarchies in and through natural systems. In what follows, we focus on the crises that allow social relations to nature to be reformed or reasserted. This focus on crisis and responses to crisis is deliberate: the manifold crises of climate systems breakdown are likely to define the future of nature politics, and as they do, we must be ready.
Notes
1 1. Robert M. Beyer, Andrea Manica and Camilo Mora, ‘Shifts in Global Bat Diversity Suggest a Possible Role of Climate Change in the Emergence of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2’. Science of The Total Environment, 26 January 2021, 145413. See also Rob Wallace, Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of Covid-19 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020).
2 2. Umberto Eco, ‘Ur-Fascism’. New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995.
3 3. Andreas Malm, How to Blow up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2020), p. 54.
4 4. See Sam Moore and Alex Roberts, Post-Internet Far Right (London: Dog Section Press, 2021), Introduction.
5 5. Clive Hamilton, Requiem for a Species (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2010), p. 209.
6 6. Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright, Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future (New York: Verso, 2018).
7 7. Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism (New York: Verso, 2021).
8 8. For example, Mathew Lawrence and Laurie Laybourn-Langton, Planet on Fire: A Manifesto for the Age of Environmental Breakdown (New York: Verso, 2021).
9 9. Bernhard Forchtner, ‘Eco-Fascism “Proper”: The Curious Case of Greenline Front’, Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, 25 June 2020, https://www.radicalrightanalysis.com/2020/06/25/eco-fascism-proper-the-curious-case-of-greenline-front/.
10 10. James Delingpole, The Little Green Book of Eco-Fascism: The Left’s Plan to Frighten Your Kids, Drive Up Energy Costs and Hike Your Taxes! (London: Biteback Publishing, 2014).
11 11. Frank Uekötter, The Green and the Brown: A History of Conservation in Nazi Germany, Illustrated edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 14.
12 12. For example, Murray Bookchin, ‘Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology: A Challenge for the Ecology Movement’. Green Perspectives: Newsletter of the Green Program Project, Summer 1987.
13 13. Keith Mako Woodhouse, The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), p. 2.
14 14. Ibid, p. 196.
15 15. Ibid.
16 16. Ben Makuch, ‘Fascists Impersonate Climate Group to Say Coronavirus Is Good for Earth’. VICE News, 25 March 2020. https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7jmmx/fascists-impersonate-climate-group-to-say-coronavirus-is-good-for-earth.
17 17. Emily Atkin, ‘The Antler Guy Isn’t a Climate Activist. He’s an Eco-Fascist’. HEATED (blog), 11 January 2021. https://heated.world/p/the-antler-guy-isnt-a-climate-activist; Jules Evans, ‘A Closer Look at the “QAnon Shaman” Leading the Mob’. GEN (blog), 7 January 2021. https://gen.medium.com/the-q-shaman-conspirituality-goes-rioting-on-capitol-hill-24bac5fc50e6.
18 18. Charlotte Ward and Prof David Voas, ‘The Emergence of Conspirituality’. Journal of Contemporary Religion 26, no. 1 (2011): 103–21; see also Egil Asprem and Asbjørn Dyrendal, ‘Conspirituality Reconsidered: How Surprising and How New Is the Confluence of Spirituality and Conspiracy Theory?’. Journal of Contemporary Religion 30, no. 3 (2015): 367–82.
19 19. Bernhard Forchtner, ‘Eco-Fascism: Justifications