Sweating Bullets

What is ecological imperialism?

Matt Huber

Many on the Marxist left define imperialism in terms of value transfers or unequal exchange between the Global North and South, but relations of value extraction and exploitation are also central to our theories of capitalism. I follow the work of Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, who make three important points. First, we need to keep capitalism and imperialism as two separate concepts. Second, the concept of imperialism must center on the capitalist state and its ability to coerce or limit the sovereignty of other nations and populations. Third, since World War II, the main imperial state has been the United States, whose military and economic power has been mostly incontestable, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union. 

To understand what is “ecological” about US imperialism, we can draw from traditions of ecological economics and Marxism that connect ecology to energy and the productive forces. The US military empire is a fossil-fueled planetary machine, with over 750 bases around the world. As the top global arms dealer, at around 42 percent of the total, the United States runs an unprecedented regime of automated warfare that is fundamentally different from warfare powered by human and animal muscle power prior to the twentieth century. “Ecology” can also refer to the relations and conditions of life itself. On that front, it is worth noting that the US military is a major polluter, but more important is Panitch and Gindin’s understanding of the US state as an economic empire overseeing global relations of debt, finance, and trade. The US economic empire is one that privileges capital the world over at the expense of life and ecological health. 

How should we think about the relative importance of particular imperial states and global market forces in maintaining North-South ecological inequalities?

Matt Huber

Frameworks that focus on unequal exchange and ecological unequal exchange tend to conceptualize power and imperial domination in territorial terms — North exploiting South — as opposed to class terms. It is important to see how US state power facilitates class coalitions between international capital and capitalist classes in the Global South. 

In 2002, the World Bank rewrote the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s mining law to the immense benefit of the country’s “landlord state” apparatus, a class formation that rakes in royalties and taxes from its ownership of copper, coltan, and cobalt. This extraction poisons local ecosystems, and the wealth generated does almost nothing for one of the poorest populations on the planet. Similarly, neoliberal reform in Brazil created a class alliance between global finance and export-based agribusiness capital; this helped make Brazil a global epicenter of deforestation, which is terrible for the climate and biodiversity. 

Our problem is not multiple imperial states or the broad region of the Global North but rather one imperial state: the United States. That’s why organizing working-class power in this country is a key precondition for anti-imperialist politics. It’s encouraging that democratic socialists this campaign cycle are calling for defunding the military-industrial complex — and specifically military aid to Israel — to invest in health care at home. 

In what ways does US hegemony limit developing countries’ options for responding to climate change? 

Matt Huber

On the one hand, you have Donald Trump threatening to invade a country like Colombia, which had perhaps the world’s most aggressive plan to phase out fossil fuels. But on a subtler level, US state institutions like the Treasury and Federal Reserve play a more important role by overseeing global regimes of finance and debt that constrain the Global South’s economic sovereignty. As Brett Christophers argues, poorer nations have extremely limited public sector capacity for a clean energy build-out because interest rates and the cost of capital are so high. This is directly due to the US-led international financial order, where bondholders have more power than democratic states. Many low-income countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, spend huge percentages of their public revenue servicing external debts rather than investing in public services, let alone climate action. 

Is Trump’s resource-hungry “gangster imperialism” something new?

Matt Huber

It is absolutely new in its brazenness. Most US presidents would clothe their interventions in ideologies of democracy or free markets rather than announcing naked resource grabs. But there are continuities. After the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, the United States pressured Delcy Rodríguez to push through sweeping oil law reforms that privilege foreign capital in much the same way the measures it pushed at the height of the neoliberal period did. Today, however, the level of corruption is off the charts: recent reporting suggests that the United States is managing Venezuela’s oil revenues, and people simply have no idea where the money is going. 

Can we understand the US-China rivalry in terms of energy?

Matt Huber

I think this is overstated. Many claim that the rivalry is based on the US petrostate vs. a Chinese electrostate, with a lot of hype around China’s dominance in renewables, critical minerals, electric vehicles, and battery supply chains. But unfortunately for the climate, both states are soaked in fossil fuels. China gets nearly 80 percent of its energy from fossil fuels and around three-quarters of that from coal. 

Chinese solar panels and batteries can provide useful electric power to countries on the margins, and electric vehicles obviate gasoline for passenger cars, but these technologies cannot yet erase the use of oil for transport fuel (including in aviation and shipping) and diesel for heavy machinery. China’s electrotechnology also cannot undo our massive reliance on the Middle East for natural gas–based nitrogen fertilizers, sulfur for phosphate fertilizer, helium, and more. The Strait of Hormuz crisis has revealed the degree to which China, the United States, and the entire world economy remain dependent upon global flows of fossil fuels — and how the United States still suffers from oil prices determined by global markets, even when it is the number one oil producer in the world.