First published
at Red Fightback
The popular
usage of “Anthropocene” to denote our current geological epoch is intended to
highlight the negative impact of human activity on the climate, but in
suggesting that all of humanity is equally culpable, it obscures the real cause
of environmental devastation: the capitalist-imperialist destruction of nature.
Francoise Vergès has proposed the term “racial
Capitalocene” to foreground the historical development of capitalism
through the blood and fire of European colonialism and the transatlantic slave
trade – which was accompanied by the felling of forests, commodification of
fertile land and extraction of precious metals by bonded labour – and the
ongoing neo-colonial exploitation of the Global South, mediated by the
intertwined racial logics of anti-blackness, anti-indigeneity and caste
oppression.
Today, the imperialist
tentacles of Britain’s agribusiness and extractivist corporations extend
throughout the oppressed world, undermining food autonomy and causing the mass
displacement of peasant communities. The brunt of land expropriation and loss
of common property resources is especially borne by rural women, who have
further been subjected to Malthusian population control policies including
forcible sterilisations.
Within the
west, reformist social democratic responses to climate breakdown such as the
“Green New Deal” promoted by the Labour Party (and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in
America) merely represent new forms of neo-colonial extractivism and land
theft. The green movement must internalise the anti-racist environmental
critique advanced by the Black Lives Matter movement and Wretched of the Earth
collective, and take up the demand for “climate reparations” to oppressed
countries.
A serious
challenge to ecosystem collapse will require a radical anti-imperialist
environmentalism, drawing on the pioneering agroecological thought of Global
South Marxists like Thomas Sankara, Walter Rodney, and José Carlos Mariátegui.
The global fight for food sovereignty is a vital frontier in the struggle
against the capitalist exploitation of land and labour – as former Chief of Staff
to the Black Panther Party David Hilliard put it, “food is a very basic
necessity, and it’s the stuff that revolutions are made of.”
Environmental
Racism and the Green Revolution
Contemporary
environmental racism is rooted in the history of colonialism and the thought of
Thomas Malthus, an imperialist who advanced the idea of innate limits on
population growth, so that agro-ecological catastrophes in exploited countries
were deemed “natural”. During the Great Famine in Ireland (1845-9), the British
colonisers shipped food out of the country while millions died of starvation.
Charles Trevelyan, the administrator responsible for food relief, was a student
of Malthus and claimed the problem was “not the physical evil of the Famine,
but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the
[Irish] people”.
An estimated 10.3 million people died in the
Indian famine of 1876-9, partly the result of arable land being requisitioned
for cash crops such as opium, and again British colonial officials like Lord
Lytton invoked Malthusian principles to justify their refusal to prevent these
deaths. The 1943 Bengal famine took on catastrophic proportions when Britain
continued exporting rice from the subcontinent and denied requests for
emergency wheat supplies; echoing Trevelyan, Churchill was quoted as saying “I
hate Indians. They are a beastly people, with a beastly religion”, and in a war
cabinet meeting attributed the famine itself to Indians “breeding like
rabbits.” Mike Davis’ account of food crises in colonial India, China and
Brazil in Late Victorian Holocausts emphasises how racial
Malthusianism was bound up with capitalist “free trade” dogma:
“We not are
dealing … with ‘lands of famine’ becalmed in stagnant backwaters of world
history, but with the fate of tropical humanity at the precise moment
(1870-1914) when its labor and products were being dynamically conscripted into
a London-centered world economy. Millions died, not outside the ‘modern world
system’, but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its
economic and political structures. They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism;
indeed, many were murdered … by the theological application of the sacred
principles of [Adam] Smith, [Jeremy] Bentham and [John Stuart] Mill.”[1]
Environmental
imperialism evolved in the post-WWII era, as direct colonisation was replaced
by neo-colonialism, whereby officially “independent” countries of
the Global South were integrated into the capitalist world-economy on unequal
terms, and trapped in a relation of structural dependency upon imperialist
nations like Britain. Marxist ecologist Robert Biel highlights the centrality
of food dependency, as the neo-colonial ideology of “modernisation” justified
destroying traditional ecologically-sound farming methods – essentially,
pre-industrial societies were viewed as “backward” precisely because people
were able to live sustainably off the land.
Through the
so-called “Green Revolution” promoted by western governments and organisations
like the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1960s, the adoption in the neo-colonies
of hybridised high-yielding varieties (HYVs) of rice and wheat, as with
genetically modified organisms (GMOs) later, entailed dependence on imperialist
suppliers of overpriced specialist grains, machinery, and chemical pesticides
and herbicides.[2] Mass farmer suicides in India, often by drinking pesticides,
are “the extreme results of these policies of market freedom”.[3]
Thomas
Sankara, the great Marxist-Leninist leader of Burkina Faso who was murdered in
a French-backed coup in 1987, identified food as a critical aspect of
imperialism in his speeches: “‘Where is imperialism?’ Look
at your plates when you eat. These imported grains of rice, corn, and millet –
that is imperialism.”
The undermining
of food autonomy via HYVs, combined with overspecialisation in cash crops,
contributed to the African famines in the 1980s, while the loss of genetic
variety exacerbated vulnerabilities to climate crises. Today, the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation, which receives considerable British government
support, lobbies extensively for the introduction and strengthening of
monopolistic intellectual property regimes that underpin the Green
Revolution.[4] The Foundation’s investments include British extractive
corporations like BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, and Vedanta, agribusinesses such as
Kraft, Nestle, and Unilever, and various chemical and pharmaceutical companies.
Dependency was
further exacerbated in the neoliberal era. During the early post-war decades,
oppressed countries had paid for industrial machinery from the imperialists
through loans (import-substitution industrialisation), leaving them vulnerable
to interest rate hikes by western financial institutions – which is exactly
what happened in the 1980s. By 1992, “Africa, Asia, Latin America and the
Caribbean were together paying Britain £2,493m more annually than they got in
official grants, voluntary aid, export credits, bank loans and direct
investments from the UK”.[5]
Financial
blackmail has been used to enforce the deregulation of Global South economies
to the benefit of western multinational corporations (MNCs). This has been
combined with the more overt pressure of imperialist
economic sanctions, for instance those targeting oil-rich Venezuela which
have resulted in shortages of vital consumables, and emboldened middle class
anti-government protestors in the country who have burned
food intended for the poor and carried out murderous assaults on
Afro-Venezuelans.
Hundreds of thousands of civilians died of starvation in
Iraq because of western sanctions in the 1980s and 2000s, and the sadistic
American national security adviser Henry Kissinger openly boasted of using
“food as a weapon”. An especially horrific example of food imperialism is the
ongoing famine in Yemen, where the invasion led by Saudi Arabia – equipped with
British planes and bombs – has put millions of children at risk of starvation.
Imperialist military
and economic extortion has further facilitated the ongoing mass expropriation
of land. As Eric Holt-Giménez explains in A Foodie’s Guide to
Capitalism, since the mid-2000s western investment firms have taken
advantage of the exceedingly low price of land in Sub-Saharan Africa in the
hopes of reaping speculative gains.[6] This land grab set the stage for the
current intensification
of Green Revolution practices in Africa through the New Alliance for
Food Security and Nutrition, launched in London in 2012 by the core imperialist
nations and the African Union. Under the guise of “development aid”, African
countries are being forced to change their land ownership systems and implement
seed laws which criminalise farmers seeking to preserve their own diversified
native grains.
Much of the
land that has been bought up is used for giant animal feedlots as part of the
Livestock Revolution. The Scottish Maoist Malcolm Caldwell (1931-78) referred
to this as “protein imperialism”, as immense quantities of plant and fish-based
proteins cultivated in the Global South are converted into meat (mostly cattle)
consumed in the North, and thus “the peoples of the rich countries in a literal
sense take food out of the very mouths and bellies of the poor”.[7]
As biologist Rob
Wallace highlights, monocultures of genetically similar livestock have
the further effect of eliminating disease resilience, which, coupled with
deforestation, has caused the spread of new deadly pathogens such as Ebola,
African swine fever (which wiped out over one-quarter of the world’s pig population
last year), and now the devastating COVID-19 global pandemic.
In the
neoliberal age unsustainable economic practices have been challenged by the
environmental movement, but imperialism has responded to this pressure by
adapting new forms of exploitation more palatable to the western public. Samir
Amin, the late theorist of unequal development, explained how in this new
paradigm “green capitalism” has become “part of the obligatory discourse of
men/women in positions of power, on both the Right and the Left, in the
[imperialist] Triad (of Europe, North America and Japan), and of the executives
of oligopolies.”
A central
example of this “green” capitalism is the rapid spread of biofuels which, far
from being an environmentally friendly alternative to the dwindling fossil fuel
reserves, entails a massive increase in deforestation and the commercialisation
of fertile land, putting added pressure on food markets in underdeveloped
countries. Government-sponsored “activist” NGOs have played a crucial role in
promoting biofuels as ecologically viable.
Capitalist
Extractivism and Peasant Dispossession
Capitalist
extraction (of oil and natural gas, metals, and minerals) is also directly tied
to the disruption of food sovereignty. Take the case of Shell
in Nigeria, where from 1976-1991 2,976 incidents of oil spills occurred in
Ogoniland, rendering farming, the primary source of villagers’ livelihood,
unviable. Shell has also been implicated in the
murders of Nigerian environmental activists, which the British government
has endeavoured to cover up. Similar horror stories follow Britain’s
investments across every continent of the Global South.
Recent Freedom
of Information requests have revealed that British officials including Liz
Truss met with Brazil’s far-right president Bolsonaro before and after his 2018
election victory, to discuss “free trade, free markets and post-Brexit
opportunities”. Truss is a former Shell employee who works in the Department
for International Trade, which was caught secretly
lobbying the Brazilian government on behalf of Shell and British
Petroleum in 2017.
BP also owns
the largest biofuel plant in Brazil, responsible for mass deforestation and
pollution, and its heavy use of resources contributed to the 2014 São Paulo
water crisis. British mining giant Anglo American has made
almost 300 requests for permission to explore 18 indigenous territories in the
Amazon, some of which are home to uncontacted peoples; in many regions extractive
activities have already driven out the animals and fish that indigenous
communities rely on to subsist. Boris
Johnson was personally thanked by the Brazilian government for
refusing to support European action over the Amazon fires, fuelled by the
destruction of forest to create pasture for cattle, and Britain has also
engaged in security co-operation with the Bolsonaro administration, which is
notorious for the brutal suppression of protestors and activists.
In India, the
introduction of neoliberal capitalism has displaced peasants from their land en
masse (a form of what Marx called “primary accumulation” of capital), to
facilitate the creation of deregulated Special Economic Zones (SEZs). This new
round of primary accumulation reflects the lasting impact of the colonial
British administration, which reinforced the oppressive caste system and deemed
hill-dwelling peoples who practiced shifting cultivation and shared communal
property as “primitive” and lacking land ownership rights.
In the
1980s-90s, hill-dwelling
Adivasi (“original people”) populations were the first victims of expropriation
for dams and mining. In addition to land dispossession, the SEZs have also
increased the costs of fruit, plant, and vegetable resources that were formerly
gathered by rural communities from the forests.
The British-based aluminium
company Vedanta has been linked to the killings of Adivasi activists protesting
the mining of bauxite in the Niyamgiri hills. In 2012 and 2018, protestors in
London targeted the British government’s collusion with Vedanta’s atrocities,
but the company, with government support, is now “diversifying
into iron in Goa, Karnataka and Liberia, zinc in Rajasthan, Namibia, South
Africa and Ireland, copper in Zambia and oil in Sri Lanka’s ecologically
fragile Mannar region”.
Extractivism-driven
peasant dispossession has also been a principle cause of what has been called
the “feminisation of poverty”. Women bear the brunt of expropriation as the
loss of common property resources increases their unpaid workload in acquiring
water for households and fodder for animals. Displaced rural women, especially
those whose oppression is compounded by caste such as landless Dalits (previously
called “untouchables”), have also been forced into the lowest-paid waged work
in sweatshops (often contracted to western multinationals like Topshop).
The
gendered nature of primary accumulation is reflected in the sexual violence
against rural women perpetrated by the police and military – in rural Haryana,
increasing violence against Dalit women is directly related to agricapitalist
land dispossession.
Capitalist
accumulation by dispossession has further been accompanied by an imperialist
assault on the sexual-reproductive autonomy of rural Global South women, in the
form of neo-Malthusian population control policies. Racial Malthusianism continues
to influence mainstream environmentalism. David Attenborough, celebrated in
Britain as a national treasure, has claimed
there are “too many people” in Ethiopia (a country with a population
density nearly 10 times lower than Britain’s), and is a patron of the
Malthusian charity Population Matters which has campaigned
to ban Syrian refugees from Britain.
As Sankara used
to insist, Africa remains a relatively underpopulated continent –
the problem is imperialist maldevelopment and ecological disruption. In recent
years, the Gates Foundation has been especially influential in reviving both
variables in Malthus’ original population equilibrium (human fertility and
agricultural production).
Malthus-inspired eugenics has a long history in the
context of the Cold War, when western elites’ fears of global communism were
meshed with images of “teeming hordes” and the “yellow peril”: a 1974 UN
Security Council report warned of the propensity of people in “high fertility
populations” to “attack such targets as multinational corporations”, and to
“advocate a better distribution of the world’s wealth”.[8]
While women’s
sexual-reproductive autonomy is a fundamental human right, neoliberal
population policies have co-opted this feminist concern, as the mass provision
of contraceptives in poor nations has often been tied to economic coercion and
food imperialism. In population control discourses, black and brown women
themselves are demonised for having an “excess” of fertility (i.e. having “too
many” children), and essentially blamed for the social problems caused by
imperialist underdevelopment.
During the
1970s-80s, “Forcible and coercive sterilisation of urban and rural poor women
took place on a massive scale – in Bangladesh sterilisation was in many cases
made a condition for food relief … In India, when central and state governments
were unable to meet impossibly high targets, local administrations set targets
for sterilisations for non-health personnel like teachers and forest officers.”
These kinds of
policies have by no means relented. In 2011, British minister for international
developments Stephen O’Brien announced a joint initiative with pharmaceutical
corporation Merck to promote the long-lasting implant Implanon, discontinued
within Britain due to safety concerns, to “14.5 million of the poorest women”
by 2015.[9] Dalit and Adivasi women have protested against sterilisation camp
deaths and coerced hysterectomies, as well as against toxifying pollution and
chemical pesticides linked with reproductive health problems, increased rates
of breast cancer, changes to immune systems, and developmental problems in
children.[10]
The Global
Fight for Food Sovereignty
The struggle
for control of food and land is a vital frontier in the fight against
capitalism, and it is black, indigenous, and other oppressed communities who
are themselves taking the lead in combating environmental imperialism. As
co-founder of the Black Panther Party Huey Newton wrote in his 1974 essay
“Dialectics of Nature”, the “rising expectations of the Human Rights revolution
in the exploited world will violently disrupt the reactionary distortion of the
chain of nature in its favor.”[11]
The Black
Panthers themselves responded to the hunger that is disproportionately
inflicted upon impoverished black communities by feeding tens of thousands of
school children through their free
breakfast programme. Exploited farmers around the world are resisting the
commodification of land and natural resources – villagers in Sub-Saharan Africa
have taken action against Green Revolution policies through courts and farmers’
forums, and a movement to defend caste-oppressed rural women’s food security
has been launched by the All-India Democratic Women’s Association (the women’s
wing of the Communist Party of India). In the occupied West Bank, Palestinian
farmers have started a movement of sustainable and community-supported farming in
response to the encroachment of agribusinesses and Israeli settlers’
monopolising of water resources.
In the Americas
there has been both black and indigenous resistance to extractivism, a result
of the intertwined colonial legacy of native genocide and the slave trade. In
Brazil, historical societies of escaped slaves such as Palmares, which allied
with indigenous peoples and launched guerrilla raids on coastal sugar
plantations, continue to inspire resistance to the white supremacist,
imperialist-allied Bolsonaro government and its agricapitalist and mining
projects.
Bolsonaro has
vilified the quilombos – marginalised Afro-Brazilian communities who are
descended from fugitive slaves, and often also have indigenous ancestry – stating
they are “not even fit for procreation”, and threatening to expropriate
their land. Taking inspiration from the transnational Black Lives Matter (BLM)
movement, Afro-Brazilian activists have launched the campaign #VidasQuilombolasImportam
(Quilombola
Lives Matter).
The globalised
agricapitalist industry is highly integrated, and all exploited sectors of
society have been involved in resisting it. Urban protests took place globally
in response to the 2007-8 food price crisis, caused by the spread of biofuels,
financial speculation, imperialist conflicts, and extreme climate events including
a drought in Australia. Agribusiness monopolies reaped huge profits while
millions of poor people went hungry. Food insecurity has been further
exacerbated in the immediate COVID context.
Already 135
million people world-wide experience critical food insecurity, and in Kenya the
price of maize, a staple food, has risen over 60% since 2019. Globalised
capitalist food supply chains, based on “just-in-time” production, have been
heavily disrupted by trade restrictions, and by
the end of 2020 an estimated 265 million people could be on the brink of
starvation.
Enough food is
produced globally to feed 14 billion people, but mountains of produce are being
dumped and livestock culled to prop up prices. The UN World Food Programme has
responded to the pandemic by calling
for £1.6 billion of pledged food relief, but this would only reinforce the
western “development aid” paradigm that forced the Global South into structural
dependency in the first place. As happened a decade earlier, mass hunger amid
skyrocketing economic inequality has sparked popular backlash, including food
protests in Chile, Kenya, and South Africa.
Socialist
responses to environmental imperialism have been especially effective when
urban working-class mobilisation has been coupled with traditions of local
peasant resistance. In Kerala,
a state in India, the government led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist)
has sponsored self-sufficient farming collectives encompassing a quarter of a
million women, and responded to the COVID crisis by issuing free food grains to
poor communities.
Socialist Cuba
is recognised
as the most sustainably developed economy on the planet, and its Organopónico
urban farms provide the majority of the fruit and vegetables consumed
in cities like Havana, as well as growing plants important to traditional
Afro-Cuban cultural expression. In South America, the emphasis placed by
Peruvian communist José Carlos Mariátegui on respect for indigenous autonomy
and traditions of resistance has been especially influential.
Before the
imperialist coup in Bolivia, Evo Morales’ Movement for Socialism had begun
progressive land reforms that helped cut
poverty in half, and recognised
Pachamama (Mother Earth) as a legal subject. Global South Marxists have
also emphasised resisting the imperialist destruction of traditional knowledge
systems, for instance the Guyanese revolutionary Walter Rodney pointed out the
expertise of African peasants who had “familiarized themselves with the
environment over centuries”, and noted that before colonialism the African diet
had been “more varied, being based on a more diversified agriculture”.[12]
Environmental
anti-imperialism has been brought right into the heart of the parasitic Global
North by black radical movements, for example the “greening the ghetto”
campaign in America targeting the dumping of toxic waste in working-class black
communities. As Dorceta Taylor notes, it is particularly women of colour who
“have been at the forefront of the struggle to bring attention to the issues
that are devastating minority communities—issues such as hazardous waste
disposal; exposure to toxins; occupational health and safety; lead poisoning,
cancers, and other health issues; housing; pollution; and environmental
contamination.”[13]
Again these
issues are strongly tied to reproductive justice, for instance the lead
contamination of water in Flint, Michigan (a predominantly black city) has
resulted in miscarriages and reduced fertility. In Britain BLM
UK, which in 2016 protested to stop flights at London City airport, has
pointed out how air pollution in Britain disproportionately affects
working-class black and brown people, while relating this local situation to
the global imperialist reality:
“The
inequalities that turn an extreme weather event into a disaster or human
catastrophe mirror the inequalities that cause the disproportionate loss of
black and poor life globally – and the exact systems that Black Lives Matter
fights against. … [And] due to rising global inequality – that remains part of
the legacy of imperialism and colonialism, and part of the present reality of
globalisation and capitalism – we also know that the resources required to
respond to climate change’s impact are often not placed in the hands of the
people who need them most.”
BLM activists
have also taken solidarity actions with indigenous struggles, including joining
protestors at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation targeting the construction
of a new oil pipeline. In Britain black, brown and indigenous grassroots
organisations have coalesced in the Wretched of the Earth collective, whose
article “Darkening
the White Heart of the Climate Movement” highlights the chauvinism directed
against the indigenous bloc at the 2015 London Climate March, which was
attended by delegates from the Pacific Islands and the Sami Nation in Sweden.
The liberal
NGOs at the march like Greenpeace tried to remove radical signs that charged
“British Imperialism causes climate injustice” in favour of those projecting a
more “positive message”, and attempted to replace the indigenous contingent
with people dressed as animals; summoning police when this was resisted. It was
only due to the resilience of the indigenous bloc that it regained its position
at the head of the march. The mainstream climate movement is yet to recognise that
the fight to save the environment and defend food sovereignty is necessarily a
fight against capitalist white supremacy.
Against
Social Imperialism with a Green Face
Social
imperialism, as defined by Lenin, describes those sections of the “left” in
rich countries who give tacit or active support for their national
bourgeoisie’s colonialist plunder abroad, in exchange for “bribes” in the form
of relatively higher standards of living for better-off layers of the working
class.
Since the
1970s, particularly black feminists in the environmental and peace movements
like Wilmette Brown have criticised the dominant NIMBY (“not in my back yard”)
approach of the white western green left, meaning its indifference to issues of
racism, imperialism, and gendered primary accumulation.[14] As the Sri
Lanka-born British socialist and black radical intellectual Ambalavaner
Sivanandan wrote, “to the extent that the Green movement is concerned more,
say, with the environmental pollution of the western world than with the
ecological devastation of the Third World caused by western capitalism, its
focus becomes blinkered and narrow and its programmes partial and susceptible
to capitalist overtures.”[15]
Things are no
different today. As the Wretched collective reflects,
“Greta Thunberg calls world leaders to act by reminding them that ‘Our house is
on fire’. For many of us, the house has been on fire for a long time: whenever
the tide of ecological violence rises, our communities, especially in the
Global South are always first hit.”[16]
The concerns of
the “international community” are primarily based on the forecasted impact of
climate change within the Global North. For instance, the target global
temperature increase limit of 2ºC set at the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference
is, in the words of the chair of the G77 group of developing countries Lumumba
Di-Aping, “asking Africa to sign a suicide pact” because the 2ºC average
increase (which the planet is currently set to hit within the next 15 years)
would mean lethal rises in excess of 3.5ºC for many parts of Africa.
This
whitewashing of climate justice is also typified by the Extinction
Rebellion (XR) environmental movement, which has adopted a pro-police
stance that has put migrants and racialised minorities at serious risk during
demonstrations, while XR co-founder Gail Bradbrook has referred to
“overpopulation and overconsumption” as the “ultimate” cause of climate
breakdown. In the US, the “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders has argued for
American aid to be funnelled to Malthusian population control projects as
a response to climate change.
Social
democratic responses to climate breakdown that go no further than attempting to
“reform” imperialist-capitalism are wholly inadequate. Corbyn, for all his internationalist
rhetoric, made no concrete pledges regarding material restitution for
(neo-)colonialism, cancelling oppressed nations’ debt, banning extractivist
activities by British corporations or ending unequal exchange. Nor should it be
forgotten that the darling of the Labour “left”, Corbyn’s mentor Tony Benn,
signed a contract with Rio Tinto to extract uranium from Namibia when it was
illegally occupied by the South African apartheid regime.[17]
Labour’s Green
New Deal, which the reformist Communist Party of Britain supports as an avenue
for job creation within Britain, essentially represents a revamped state
investment-driven extractivism. As director of War on Want Asad Rehman
explained in The Independent,
in this new “green” imperialism the “metals and minerals needed to build our
wind turbines, our solar panels and electric batteries will be ripped out of
the earth so that the UK continues to enjoy ‘lifeboat ethics’: temporary
sustainability to save us, but at the cost of the poor.”
Resource
extraction is responsible for 50% of global emissions, and as Rehman notes
“behind each tonne of extraction is a story of contamination and depletion of
water, destruction of habitats, deforestation, poisoning of land, health
impacts on workers and hundreds of environmental conflicts – including the
murder of two environmental defenders each and every week.” Bolivia is home to the
largest known reserves of lithium (used for electric cars), which Morales had
begun nationalising, and the coup has facilitated an imperialist
scramble for these deposits by neo-conquistadors like Elon Musk of
Tesla.
As we
pointed out at the time, in the weeks leading to the coup the phony
“socialists” at Novara Media (as well as XR) jumped on the
bandwagon of the “#SOSBolivia” PSYOP campaign led by Jhanisse Vaca Daza, a
graduate of a CIA-sponsored regime change academy, which essentially blamed
Morales for damage to the Amazon caused by western MNCs and the fascistic
Brazilian government. Under the new US-backed dictatorship in Bolivia there
have been bloody pogroms against the indigenous population of which Morales was
part.
All this raises
important questions about the nature of socialist transition in an imperialist
country like Britain. Since the 1990s, Britain’s food self-sufficiency has
declined considerably – in the first half of 2018 alone, Britain imported £23
billion worth of consumable food, and the price of food imports will rise
sharply due to Brexit. The national food industry is extremely inefficient,
with nearly
10 million tonnes of food produced wasted annually (most of this waste
occurs at the production, supply and retail stages), while hunger is rapidly on
the rise among the poorest sections of the country.
Three weeks
into the COVID lockdown, the Food
Foundation charity reported that 1.5 million Britons had not eaten for
a whole day because they had no money or access to food, and three million
people were in households where someone had been forced to skip meals. In the
immediate term, there is a pressing need to fight for diversified small-scale
and community-supported food production (e.g. mixed
livestock and cropping methods and urban Green Belt farms), and
nationalise the big supermarkets, food processors and wholesaler monopolies
under democratic workers’ control.
But these
demands need to be coupled with a clear anti-imperialist perspective, including
an end to biotech monopolies, and to the dumping of “excess” product on poor
countries which depresses the prices of local produce.
The
Landworkers’ Alliance, a union of small farmers in Britain, has made an
important intervention in its recommendations for
sustainable farming and food sovereignty, but there is a glaring omission in
its failure to address the exploitation of migrant workers. The post-Brexit
deregulation of the food industry threatens to take us back to the situation
that led to the deaths
of at least 21 Chinese cockle pickers at Morecambe Bay in 2004.
Britain’s
ruling class exploits migrants as a low paid and flexible workforce, as with
the Romanian
workers flown in during the COVID lockdown to pick fruit, while
upholding a repressive border regime of racist immigration controls,
dehumanising asylum detentions and arbitrary deportations. As the Wretched
collective points
out, it is imperialist wars and “corporate climate genocidal
mega-development” that are the main drivers of mass forcible population
displacements, and according
to the UN, climate breakdown could uproot up to 250 million people by 2050.
The imperialist
bourgeoisie will respond to climate change by attempting to monopolise vital
resources like water, and by further tightening the racist border regimes of
the Global North. It is critical for socialists in Britain to fight to defend
migrants’ rights, pay, and conditions, and for an end to racist
hostile environment policies.
The green
movement within the imperialist core must also take up the demand for
reparations for slavery, indigenous genocide, and ongoing wealth drain through
neo-colonial unequal exchange. The main demands for reparatory justice, as
outlined by the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), include imperialist
debt cancellation; monetary compensation; and “technology transfer and science
sharing”, which would include farming-related intellectual property.
Reparations
should also be extended to encompass the “climate debt” owed by the
Global North: imperialist maldevelopment has not only caused the degradation of
agroecology in Global South countries, but also ensured they lack the
infrastructure to cope with the environmental breakdown largely caused by rich
nations – North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia have contributed
around 61% of total CO2 emissions, compared to 13% for China and India
together. As Leon Sealey-Huggins emphasises, “crucial to understanding the
connections between structural racism and climate change is an acknowledgement
that ‘vulnerabilities’ to extreme weather are not ‘natural’.”
Sealey-Huggins
highlights the example of Haiti, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere
thanks to the legacy of slavery and the absurd post-independence debt payments
extorted by France, which has undermined its ability to cope with extreme
weather events like the 2010 earthquake. By contrast, “the Dutch – whose empire
and industrialisation was built on the backs of unpaid slave labour – can
afford €16 billion for flood defence schemes, while most countries in the
Caribbean region have reported delays in accessing any of the resources
required to implement their plans for responding to climate change.”[18]
As well as the
immediate demand for reparations owed by the imperialist British government,
revolutionaries in Britain must advance a vision of socialist construction that
is uncompromising in its commitment to divesting from imperialist relations.
Here we can draw on the historical example of the non-exploitative trade
relations between Cuba and the industrialised Soviet Union, “based on the
principle that relative prices be fixed to ensure the exchange of equal
quantities of labor”.[19]
As Che
Guevara argued at the Afro-Asian Conference in Algeria in 1965: “There
should be no more talk about developing mutually beneficial trade based on
prices forced on the backward countries by the [capitalist] law of value and
the international relations of unequal exchange … The [developed] socialist
countries should help pay for the development of the underdeveloped countries”.
Reparative
justice, like carceral abolitionism,
doesn’t have to remain utopian if socialists place it firmly on their agenda.
The working-class within Britain would also ultimately stand
to benefit greatly in the long-term from the establishment of new, truly
equitable relationships and knowledge sharing with anti-imperialist countries
of the oppressed world – for instance, Britain’s decaying agricultural sector
could be much improved by drawing on the innovative sustainable farming
techniques developed in Cuba. The working-class movement in Britain needs to
articulate a revolutionary eco-socialist project with an unyielding dedication
to internationalist principles. As the Wretched collective stress:
“The fight
for climate justice is the fight of our lives, and we need to do it right. We
share this reflection from a place of love and solidarity, by groups and
networks working with frontline communities, united in the spirit of building a
climate justice movement that does not make the poorest in the rich countries
pay the price for tackling the climate crisis, and refuses to sacrifice the
people of the global South to protect the citizens of the global North. It is
crucial that we remain accountable to our communities, and all those who don’t
have access to the centres of power. Without this accountability, the call for
climate justice is empty.”
Overcoming
nationalist approaches to environmentalism in Britain, one of the oldest
imperialist countries, will not be easy. To quote Sankara again:
“As Karl Marx said, those who live in a palace do not think about the same
things, nor in the same way, as those who live in a hut. This struggle to
defend the trees and forests is above all a struggle against imperialism.
Because imperialism is the arsonist setting fire to our forests and our
savannas.”
The advent of
XR, the involvement of trade unions in last year’s climate strikes, and the
enthusiasm of many young people for environmental justice are all very encouraging
developments, but presenting a serious challenge to climate collapse will
necessitate a complete rupture from social imperialism. Decaying capitalism
remains unrelenting in its extractivist death drive, and we must make no
mistake: either the toiling classes and oppressed peoples of the world
will inherit the Earth, or there will be no Earth to inherit.
Endnotes
[1] Mike
Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the
Third World (Verso Press, 2001), p. 9.
[2] Robert
Biel, Sustainable Food Systems: The Role of the City (UCL
Press, 2016), pp. 74-77. Open access at https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/83490#
[3] Vandana
Shiva and Kunwar Jalees, Seeds of Suicide: The Ecological and Human
Costs of Seed Monopolies and Globalisation of Agriculture (Systems
Vision, 2006), p. viii.
[4] Amanda Shaw
and Kalpana Wilson, “The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the
Necro-Populationism of ‘Climate-Smart’ Agriculture”, Gender, Place
& Culture, 27:3 (2020), p. 376.
[5] Arun
Kundnani, The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain (Pluto
Press, 2007), p. 31.
[6] Eric
Holt-Giménez, A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism: Understanding the
Political Economy of What We Eat (Monthly Review Press and Food First
Books, 2017), pp. 102-3.
[7] Malcolm
Caldwell, The Wealth of Some Nations (Zed Press, 1977), p. 14.
Recognising Caldwell’s contributions to theorising imperialist unequal exchange
should not be taken as an endorsement of his controversial views on Cambodia.
Like many members of the “anti-revisionist” Marxist-Leninist movement of the
1970s, Caldwell’s perspective on international relations was warped by the
Sino-Soviet split, which helps explain his support for the Khmer Rouge regime –
an error of judgement Caldwell paid for with his life when he was shot dead
after meeting with Pol Pot.
[8] Kalpana
Wilson, Race, Racism and Development: Interrogating History, Discourse
and Practice (Zed Books, 2012), pp. 91-4.
[9] Ibid., p.
85.
[10] Shaw and
Wilson, “The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation”, p. 374.
[11] Huey P.
Newton, The Huey P. Newton Reader (Seven Stories Press, 2002),
p. 312.
[12] Walter
Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (East African
Educational Publishers Ltd, 2009), p. 40; p. 236.
[13] Dorceta E.
Taylor, “Women of Color, Environmental Justice, and Ecofeminism”, in Karen J.
Warren (ed.), Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature (Indiana
University Press, 1997), p. 39.
[14] Wilmette
Brown, Black Women and the Peace Movement (Falling Wall Press,
1984).
[15]
Ambalavaner Sivanandan, “All That Melts into Air is Solid: The Hokum of New
Times”, Race & Class, 31:3 (1990), p. 11.
[16] The
whitewashing of the environmental movement is sometimes literal, as when
Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate was blatantly cropped out of a photo of
Thunberg and several other white activists by the Associated Press at the Davos
2020 climate summit.
[17] Katherine
Yih, Albert Donnay, Annalee Yassi, A. James Ruttenber and Scott Saleska,
“Uranium Mining and Milling for Military Purposes”, in Arjun Makhojami et
al., Nuclear Wastelands: A Global Guide to Nuclear Weapons Production
and Its Health and Environmental Effects (MIT Press, 2000), p. 142.
[18] Leon
Sealey-Huggins, “‘The Climate Crisis is a Racist Crisis’: Structural Racism,
Inequality and Climate Change”, in Azeezat Johnson et al. (eds), The
Fire Now: Anti-Racist Scholarship in Times of Explicit Racial Violence (Zed
Books, 2018), pp. 103-7.
[19] John Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century:
Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis (Monthly
Review Press, 2016), p. 210.
