Sketching a Theory of Fossil Imperialism

By Bernardo Jurema and Elias Koenig

This is a summary of the paper ‘State Power and Capital in the Climate Crisis: A Theory of Fossil Imperialism,’ presented by the authors during the “Confronting Climate Coloniality” - Paper Session at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) annual meeting on March 26th, 2023. It is also an overview of some of the main ideas that we hope to further develop this year. While the research behind the conference paper was carried out at Research Institute for Sustainability - Helmholtz Centre Potsdam (RIFS), the opinions and viewpoints expressed herein are our own and do not represent the standpoints of RIFS as a whole. This piece was originally published on the RIFS Potsdam website.

In recent years, both activists and researchers have started to invoke the term fossil imperialism to highlight the ways in which imperialist politics are tied up with the logic of fossil capitalism. Under fossil capitalism, ceaseless accumulation of capital necessitates continued expansion of an energy base of coal, oil, and natural gas. Imperial states play a key role in the process, which has in turn enabled a remarkable concentration of imperial power and continues to do so in today’s world order. Understanding fossil imperialism, therefore, is necessary for devising effective strategies of resistance to a planet-wrecking capitalist status quo.

Our model of fossil imperialism attempts to sketch the general workings of this relationship between imperial states and fossil capital in its historical development over the past two centuries and in its different varieties. It is principally based on the two general modes of expansion and obstruction. On the one hand, the expansion and protection of new fossil fuel resources and infrastructure are crucial to keeping the engine rooms of fossil capital well-supplied. On the other hand, the obstruction or destruction of the infrastructure of rivaling capital factions and states in order to maintain control over pricing and distribution has been equally integral to the history of fossil imperialism. In this way, the workings of fossil imperialism reflect the more general nature of capitalism as a mode of production and destruction.

It is important to take into account the specific characteristics of the three dominant sources of fossil energy (coal, oil, gas) when analyzing concrete cases. While all three energy sources still hold a significant share of the global fossil economy, each also corresponds to a distinct historical phase in the development of fossil imperialism. Coal powered the rise of the British Empire, the switch to oil marked the ascent of American hegemony in the 20th century, and fossil gas is increasingly at the core of the United States’ attempt to continue projecting its supremacy well into the 21st century. While there is growing concern over new forms of "green imperialism", especially in relation to the extraction and distribution of the raw materials supposedly required to decarbonize the economies of the North, current fossil-fueled conflicts such as the Russian war in Ukraine or the Saudi war in Yemen show that the age of fossil imperialism is - unfortunately - far from over.

There are at least five ways in which imperial states facilitate the interests of fossil capital: through colonization, the projection of military power, the suppression of anti-extractivist movements, economic warfare, and the domination of global institutions. This scheme makes plain the crucial role of fossil fuels, functioning variously as a driver, as an enhancer or as an outcome of imperial states' actions. It disentangles the ways in which contemporary politics are significantly influenced by fossil fuels, which have played a defining role in shaping the structure of capitalist corporations, settler-imperial states, and earth-transforming technoscience. These arrangements have had profound consequences for ecological destruction and the implementation of ecological management strategies.

Colonization is a form of direct political domination and subjugation of one people by another. It was perhaps most evident during the “golden” age of coal, the fossil fuel that powered the rise of the British Empire — from Australia to India, from South Africa to Borneo. Because coal extraction requires a large amount of disciplined labor, arguably, it also necessitates more comprehensive forms of social and political control than oil and gas extraction. At the same time, the British — in many cases — obstructed the rapid expansion of foreign coal industries to protect their own domestic industry.  Even in the case of oil and gas, many of the major private companies like BP and Shell still operate in markets shaped by colonial legacies.

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“Projection of military power” refers to different kinds of military interventions short of full-on colonization. Historically, states often deployed their own forces to protect fossil infrastructure abroad — a practice that continues today in various ways. Projection of military power also takes place through proxy armies, funded through a closed circuit of oil money and weapons contracts, as in the case of the Gulf monarchies. The 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq reminds us how current the role of military power remains. Twenty years after the regime-change military intervention, the United States still has 2500 troops stationed in the country. And, as has recently been revealed, BP and Shell, which had been barred from the country for decades, have extracted tens of billions of dollars in Iraqi oil post-invasion.

The pursuit of regional economic dominance on the part of fossil imperial states requires the suppression of anti-extractivist movements and other grassroots movements opposed to the social order. Interventionary military assistance was justified from the 1990s onwards on the basis of immigration enforcement, anti-narcotics control, and fighting against general criminality. For example, the role of the War on Drugs in continuing counterinsurgent practices against civilian population that were carried out until the late 1980s within a Cold War framework. However, according to Russell Crandall, professor at Davidson College in North Carolina and former Pentagon and National Security Council official under George W. Bush, the significant role in shaping outcomes is not primarily played by the U.S. military advisors, but rather by the "imperial diplomats" – the civilian officials within the U.S. foreign policy structure.

In his study of economic sanctions, Cornell historian Nicholas Mulder has demonstrated that modern-day sanctions developed out of mechanisms for energy control, blacklisting, import and export rationing, property seizures and asset freezes, trade prohibitions, and preclusive purchasing, as well as financial blockade — simply put, economic warfare. He shows that effectively isolating a whole nation from the intricate networks that support global trade requires the ability to gather information and generate knowledge. This involves mapping the intricate web of physical goods and resources that connect the specific country to the rest of the globe. Key factors in this process include having legal authority and access to more precise data and statistics. What makes it possible to impose this unilateral sanctions regime on the rest of the world is the domination of the global (financial and political) institutions that regulate the trade and distribution of fossil fuels. Both 19th-century British and 20th-century US-American dominance stemmed from their respective global leadership in corporate, regulatory, technological, and financial frameworks, which in turn was tightly linked to the pound sterling and later the US dollar being the chief reserve and trade currencies of their time.

In the age of American hegemony, the United Nations and other multilateral organizations — in particular, the Bretton Woods system (the International Monetary Fund and World Bank) — have become key means to maintain its armed primacy and fossil-based economic dominance. Significantly, the US-led bloc thwarted attempts by the newly decolonized countries in the postwar period to build a fairer world order by torpedoing the Third World agenda, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the Non-Aligned Movement and the New International Economic Order.

Conclusion

It is impossible to understand imperialism without understanding the role of fossil fuels in its historical emergence and development. A climate movement that does not actively take into account the mechanisms of fossil imperialism risks being co-opted into imperialist false solutions to the climate crisis. Likewise, anti-imperial movements that fail to break definitively with the logic of fossil capitalism historically fall victim to various social and ecological contradictions. A case in point are the Pink Tide governments of the first decade of the 21st century. As University of Toronto political scientist Donald Kingsbury put it, when "faced with a choice between extraction and the local movements that made their governments possible,” these regimes “sided with extraction." A better understanding of the topic can therefore contribute to more effective climate justice activism, more strategic clarity and tactical innovation, and serve as a basis for more international solidarity.

Five Points About the Climate Crisis

[Pictured: Deforesting in Tasmania, Australia. Photo by Matt Palmer]

By Jerome Small

Republished from Red Flag.

This article is based on a speech given by Jerome Small, Victorian Socialists Northern Metro candidate in the upcoming state election, at the 30 July United Climate Rally in Melbourne.

Point number one is acknowledging whose land we’re on: the First Nations people, the Wurundjeri people and the entire Kulin nations, and the Aboriginal people around this state and around this country.  More than 200 years ago, these First People had a social system imposed on them that turned land into a commodity, that turned human beings into a commodity, that turned everything in the world into a commodity to be bought and sold for a profit.

That social system decided very quickly that it was more profitable to run sheep on this part of the world than to let human beings live on it as they had always done. And the genocide ensued. That social system continues to decide that it’s more profitable to rip coal and gas from the ground than to let Aboriginal people live on their country. That dispossession continues to this day.

So it should be both an inspiration and an education for all of us that, despite everything that that social system has visited on First Nations people, they are still here and still fighting for justice. That should be a reminder to all of us that sometimes the very survival of people depends on resistance, depends on fighting, depends on organising.

That social system is still with us, of course, and still turning the planet and everything on it into a commodity, regardless of the consequences. Which gets to my second point—that capitalism has brought us to a dire situation.

We’ve heard about wildfires in countries, like the UK and Poland, that are not accustomed to seeing wildfires, due to the massive heatwave in Europe. We know a bit about this from the Australian bushfire summer of 2019-20. It’s not hard to find accounts of firefighters attempting to fight flames 70 metres tall. Next time you’re in the city, find a fifteen-storey building. That’s 70 metres, give or take. It’s terrifying. We’re talking about flames that high—in some cases twice as high, up to 150 metres.

That’s not the scariest thing, though. The scariest thing isn’t the 33 people who died from the flames that summer, or the 400 people who died from the smoke, or the 1 billion animals that died from the fire and the smoke and the after-effects. The scariest thing isn’t that 7 percent of New South Wales, an area bigger than several European countries, burned in that year.

The scariest thing is that, according to the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO, that year of 2019—the hottest year ever recorded in Australia—will be the average temperature of a year in Australia once we get 1.5 degrees of global warming. All those flames, all that death, all that ash—they’re saying will be our average temperature.

And Labor is looking at 1.5 degrees out its rear vision mirror as it zooms past, on its planet-incinerating 43 percent target. This gets to my third point: Labor and fossil fuels.

It’s hard to picture the scale of the fossil fuel export projects that Labor is prepared to approve.

I went to the Latrobe Valley last week. As you enter the town of Morwell, you can see on your right-hand side a massive pit 100 metres deep and the size of the Melbourne CBD, all the way from Docklands through to the MCG. It was an open-cut coal mine that for 60 years fed Australia’s highest emitting power station, Hazelwood. The best estimate I’ve seen is that all of the coal fed into that power station produced 400 million tonnes of CO2. A huge contribution to global heating.

But the Scarborough gas project in Western Australia, which Labor is prepared to sign off on, will release 1.4 billion tonnes of CO2— three and a half times the amount that came from that enormous pit next to Morwell in the Latrobe Valley. Then there’s the Beetaloo project, which is a similar size—and that’s just the first of the massive gas fracking projects that Labor is prepared to endorse in the Northern Territory. Add Narrabri in NSW. Add Beach Energy down in the Otway Basin in Victoria. Thank you, Daniel Andrews, for your contribution to runaway heating.

That tells us everything we need to know about where we’re headed under Labor. They have no intention of interfering with a social system that turns everything into a commodity to be bought and sold for profit, regardless of consequences.

This gets me to the fourth point—what have we got going for us, in the face of all this? In my opinion, quite a bit.

We’ve got the huge majority of humanity who do not make billion-dollar profits from cooking the planet.

We’ve got many people in the Latrobe Valley. There’s a stereotype that the coal regions are wall to wall coal-loving blue-collar workers. That’s bullshit, and it’s an insult to say it. You go to the Latrobe Valley and, just like any other part of the country or the world, there’s a significant argument taking place. There are people in that community—and in those power stations, in fact—making arguments about the need to get out of fossil fuels as soon as possible. That’s something that we have going for us.

We’ve got the potential for mass movements like what the climate strikers showed us in 2019 around the world: some of the biggest protests that have happened in this town for a hell of a long time. We’ve got that going for us.

We’ve got civil disobedience going for us. Whether it’s Extinction Rebellion, whether it’s Blockade IMARC, whether it’s Blockade Australia, we’re going to need a shit ton more of that.

We’ve got the truth going for us—but the truth is never going to be enough. We need organisation to turn all of that into a mass movement.

One thing that we also need, if our movement is going to succeed, is radical politics. That is my final point. That’s something that a lot of people here from different perspectives share. And that’s something that the Victorian Socialists are very much building in the few months ahead in the election campaign.

Yes, we’ll be talking about reversing privatisations. Yes, we’ll be talking about zero-emissions electricity grids by 2030 and a zero-carbon economy by 2035—because I think that’s the only thing that we can be talking about if we’re serious about stopping the temperature rising far past 2019.

We’ll also be talking about a vision of a society that is not a social system that turns everything into a commodity to be bought and sold for a profit, even as the bodies pile high.

We’ll be talking about a vision of a society founded on solidarity and cooperation, which comes out of the struggles of today, and which doesn’t rely on billion-dollar corporations running our energy system and running the world. A society that says to those corporations: Do not pass go, do not collect $11.7 billion from the federal government this year. Your time is up. You’re done. Get out of the way.

You can take your 43 percent greenwashing target, you can take your coal and gas, and you can go to hell with them because we’re taking our world back. We’ll be talking about ordinary people making history over the next few months. And organising to do just that.

Capitalism's Overproduction Problem: A Primer

By Prabhat Patnaik

Republished from Monthly Review.

It is in the nature of capitalism to have “over-production crises”, i.e., crises arising from “over-production” relative to demand. “Over-production” does not mean that more and more goods keep getting produced relative to demand, so that unsold stocks keep piling up. This may happen only for a brief period in the beginning; but as stocks pile up, production gets curtailed, causing recession and greater unemployment.

“Over-production”, in short, is ex ante, in the sense that if production were to occur at full capacity use (or at some desired level of capacity utilisation), then the amount produced could not be sold because of a shortage of demand. But it manifests itself in reality in terms of recession and greater unemployment.

It is a mistake to believe that such crises are only cyclical in nature, i.e., that they get automatically reversed after a certain period of time. On the contrary, the Great Depression of the 1930s, which was a classic over-production crisis, lasted nearly a decade and was finally overcome because of the war, or, to be precise, because of military expenditure in preparation for the Second World War.

Since 2008, there has again been an over-production crisis that has persisted with varying intensity right until now. There is, thus, no question of an over-production crisis under capitalism automatically disappearing. But what was striking about the erstwhile socialist economies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is that they were free from over-production crises. The question is why?

Over-production crises under capitalism arise because of two main reasons. One, investment decisions under capitalism depend upon the expected growth of demand, for which the current growth of demand is taken as a clue: if demand slows down then investment gets restrained. Two, whenever investment gets restrained, so does consumption and hence total income (this is called the “multiplier” effect of investment).

Both these factors were eliminated under socialism. Investment was undertaken according to a plan and not the dictates of profitability; hence, there was no question of investment being curtailed when the growth of demand slowed down for any reason. This is not to say that there were no fluctuations in the level of investment. These fluctuations, however, arose not in response to profit expectations, but for entirely exogenous reasons, of which, two in particular were important.

One was agricultural output fluctuations. In years when the agricultural output went down for weather-related, or some other, reasons, investment was cut, in order to prevent excessive upward pressures on food prices; correspondingly when agricultural output revived, so did investment. These investment fluctuations, however, had nothing to do with any calculations of profitability on investment; they were unavoidable even in a planned economy.

The second reason was the operation of “echo effects”. Suppose, for instance, that a whole lot of new investment had been installed in a bunched manner at a certain date, say the beginning of the planning period. These pieces of equipment would become due for retirement again in a bunched manner around the same time some years later, which would, therefore, push up the investment plan, and hence the real gross investment around that time, so that both net investment and replacement needs are accommodated. The investment figure, therefore, would not show a steady growth but would exhibit fluctuations. But these fluctuations again had nothing to do with any calculations of profitability; they arose because of past investment history.

But even when such investment fluctuations occurred, socialist economies ensured that they did not lead to fluctuations in consumption and income, i.e., those economies snapped the multiplier relationship that necessarily characterises capitalism. This is because all firms in the economy were asked to produce to their capacity, and, if demand was low because of investment being curtailed, then they were asked to lower their prices until whatever they produced got sold.

At these “market-clearing” prices, some firms would make losses, while others would still make profits; but this would not matter since both the profit-making and the loss-making firms belonged to the State, which could, therefore, cross-subsidise the loss-making ones from the profits of the profit-making ones. And taking both groups of firms together, there would always be positive net profits as long as investment was positive (even if lower than would have been otherwise).

This was a remarkable break from what happens under capitalism, and provides a clue to why output and employment fall in a crisis there. Under capitalism, a firm does not produce when prices do not cover costs; and when demand is low, prices do not fall, because they are “administered” through collusion among the oligopolistic firms. Instead, output, and hence employment, fall in order to equate supply with demand, and to eliminate stocks which might have got built up briefly.

The matter can be looked at somewhat differently. A fall in price, with money wages and employment given, which is what happened under socialism, meant a rise in the share of wages in total output; income distribution in short shifted in favour of the workers. Since workers more or less consume their entire wages, such a shift in income distribution in favour of the workers raised the share of consumption in total output. Thus, socialist economies never experienced over-production crises because even when investment fell for some reason, output was kept unchanged and the share of consumption rose to compensate for the fall in investment (through a rise in the workers’ share in output).

This, however, can never happen under capitalism because capitalists would never voluntarily agree to a lowering of their share in output and a corresponding increase in workers’ share, even in a situation of inadequate aggregate demand. This is why capitalism experiences over-production crises: income distribution here is a matter of intense class-struggle where there is no question of capitalists agreeing to lower their own share and correspondingly raise workers’ share for the sake of overcoming a situation of over-production.

The “multiplier” that operates under capitalism, whereby a reduction in investment causes a reduction in consumption and hence total output, occurs because of income distribution not being adjustable. The “multiplier”, in other words, is predicated upon the relative shares among capitalists and workers being given.

In fact, under capitalism, far from the workers’ share rising to offset the problem of insufficient demand, the tendency in periods of crisis is the exact opposite, namely, to cut wages and raise the share of profits, which, in a situation of reduced investment that brought about the crisis in the first place, actually compounds the crisis. A 10% fall in investment in such a situation does not just bring about a 10% fall in output, as the “multiplier” analysis would suggest, but a more than 10% fall in output, say a 15% fall, because an additional squeeze on consumption through a fall in workers’ share (via the wage cut) is further superimposed upon the reduction in investment.

The fact that the relative share of the workers is not allowed to increase in order to offset the tendency towards over-production, which is a basic characteristic of capitalism, also shows its supreme irrationality as a system. It shows that the system would rather have larger unutilised capacity and unemployment, i.e., a sheer waste of productive resources for lack of demand, than produce as before by avoiding this waste through giving more to the workers. From its point of view, wasted resources are preferable to using these resources to improve workers’ consumption. True, not being a planned system, it does not make such calculations consciously; but that is what its immanent tendencies amount to. Socialism avoids any waste or slack, such as is caused by a crisis, by raising the consumption of workers appropriately to avert it.

As the collapse of the Soviet Union recedes further into history, people increasingly forget that a system had existed there, which, notwithstanding its many limitations and defects, had nonetheless been free of unemployment, of over-production crises and of the irrationality of capitalism.

Prabhat Patnaik is Professor Emeritus at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His books include Accumulation and Stability Under Capitalism (1997), The Value of Money (2009), and Re-envisioning Socialism (2011).