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Improvement was thus a key ideology in the formation of what Cedric Robinson () terms racial capitalism. Through his historical analysis, Robinson argues that the formation of racialized subjects was critical to the development of capitalism. Racism enabled both the exploitation of labor and the colonial expropriation of land. As Robinson puts it, ‘the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology’ (, 2). With this insight, scholars have excavated how racism operated in the formation of liberal legal concepts. Building on the foundational work of Cheryl Harris () who described the co-construction of whiteness and private property in the United States, Brenna Bhandar analyzes the shared conceptual logics underpinning race and private property. She argues that the ideology of improvement served to legitimate claims for private property based on particular agricultural practices, racialized bodies, and culturally contingent visions of the natural world. As she puts it, ‘Colonialism took root on the grounds of this juridical formation, twinning the production of racial subjects with an economy of private property ownership that continues to prevail over indigenous and alternate modalities of relating to and using land and its resources’ (, 7). This ideology of improvement was also institutionalized in the emergent global legal order. Public international law was constituted during the colonial encounter (Anghie ). European legal theorists justified the extension of European sovereignty to occupied colonies because they argued that Indigenous peoples ‘lack[ed] recognizable institutions of sovereign authority’ to protect private property (Ince , 45). As Ntina Tzouvala () recounts, the rights and privileges associated with membership into the family of sovereign nations were only bequeathed to non-European peoples if they met a ‘standard of civilization.’ She describes how the standard of civilization oscillated between the ‘logic of biology’ and the ‘logic of improvement.’ Whereas the former posited immutable differences between Europeans and their colonial subjects, the latter ‘conceptualized and promoted the historically contingent form of capitalist modernity had assumed in the West as the only morally acceptable state of being and equated any deviation from it with collective moral failure’ (, 55). The ideology of improvement linked the micro-practices of land use to the racialized international order. The ideology of improvement has remained embedded in the structure of legal argument around self-determination (Tzouvala ) and continues to operate as an important discourse in projects of development (Li ), but its explicit mobilization as the ideology of capitalism has receded. Neoliberalism discursively displaced the overtly paternalist and racist tropes of improvement with a vision of progress and freedom through the marketplace. Nonetheless, neoliberalism has effectively reproduced unequal integration in the global economy established during the colonial era. Like the ideology of improvement, neoliberalism is fundamentally concerned with the construction and protection of private property rights, which it identifies as the state’s raison d’être. In the face of postcolonial nations’ call for permanent sovereignty over natural resources and a new international economic order, neoliberal trade agreements effectively ‘encased’ the market to protect property from the threat of democracy (Slobodian ). Yet as discontent over global inequality has expanded, especially since the 2007–2008 global food and financial crisis and the global pandemic, even the captains of global capital have begun to recognize that neoliberalism is failing to provide them with legitimacy. Klaus Schwab, the Chairman of the World Economic Forum, recently described the COVID-19 pandemic as the ‘death knell of neoliberalism’ (Malleret and Schwab , 78). In its wake, powerful actors are turning to a new ideology to promote capitalist development, environmental transformation, and sustainable global governance: innovation. The ideology of innovation Innovation emerged as a key framework for conceptualizing capitalist development beginning in the early twentieth century. The term comes from the Latin ‘to restore’ or ‘to renew.’ Joseph Schumpeter, with whom the concept of innovation is often identified, described innovation as ‘doing things differently in the realm of economic life’ ([] ). Writing in the 1930s, Schumpeter’s analysis of innovation marked a significant shift in dominant understandings of innovation – from a process that was seen by political elites as a threat to their hold on power to a necessary process for economic growth (Godin ). Building on the liberal tradition, Schumpeter attributed the products of innovation to the sociological persona of the entrepreneur. Though even at the time of his writing, critics charged that this individualistic approach failed to account for the collective processes through which ‘new’ ideas and technologies are developed (Sweezy ), innovation nonetheless became a credo of capitalist modernity within the context of shortening business cycles. Although economists now describe innovation as a critical element of economic growth, there is significant variation in how they understand the term. Many approach innovation as a technology-driven process of economic development and promote it as part of a package of macroeconomic policies that emphasize market liberalization. In turn, a growing number of scholars are developing approaches to innovation that are more centered on equitable or sustainable growth. For example, some economists challenge the neoliberal interpretation of innovation, elaborating a critical role for the state in promoting innovation and more equitable economic development (Mazzucato ; Papaioannou ). Others have developed concepts such as ‘inclusive innovation’ to center the role of marginalized communities in processes of social and economic transformation (George, McGahan, and Prabhu ; Pansera and Owen ). These debates increasingly take place through the emerging field of ‘innovation studies’ (Fagerberg and Verspagen ). Yet beyond these nuanced academic debates, innovation has taken on a life of its own – serving as what Benoît Godin describes as ‘a panacea for every social problem’ (, 8). As he argues, ‘Innovation has an attractive and unifying force because it has legitimacy and authority and is an incontestable value or ideology. Innovation itself is the criterion of judgment: Action is undertaken in the name of innovation’ (, 3).

To that end, it is critical to conceive racial liberalism and U.S. global ascendancy as mutually constitutive. As anticolonial and antiracist movements gained political power and visibility during World War II, they exposed racial contradictions on a global scale. Politicizing the depths and injustices of Western and white supremacy, they demonstrated that European powers and the United States claimed to be fighting an antiracist and antifascist war while practicing racism and fascism against people of color at home and in their colonies. For the first time in such a concerted manner and on a broad, international scale, anticolonial and antiracist movements linked U.S. racial and wage slavery to European colonialism. These movements condemned Western imperialisms and recognized white supremacy as an illegitimate and artificial ideology of white and European domination. As the terms of the ideological Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union gelled, racism in the United States and other Western capitalist societies became the chief propaganda weapons in the Soviet Union’s arsenal. In order to successfully define the terms of global governance after World War II, U.S. bourgeoisie classes had to manage the racial contradictions that antiracist and anticolonial movements exposed. As racial liberalism provided the logic and idiom of such management, it became an essential organizing discourse and force for U.S. postwar society and global power.

At racial liberalism’s core was a geopolitical race narrative: African American integration within U.S. society and advancement toward equality, defined through a liberal framework of legal rights and racially inclusive nationalism, would establish the moral legitimacy of U.S. global leadership. As Mary Dudziak documented, this narrative served as a governing statement for U.S. propaganda, domestic politics, and culture industries throughout the 1950s and 1960s.4 Evidence that liberal antiracism was taking hold in the United States—civil rights legal victories, black American professional achievement, waning prejudice—was to prove the superiority of American democracy over communist imposition. It would demonstrate to countries emerging from colonialism that the social relations of capitalist modernity were not hopelessly compromised by white supremacy.

With recognition of the underlying violence of primitive accumulation out of which the modern American liberal state still functions, Pulido (2017) brings up the issue of there being no apparent alternative to the state in which to search for justice, environmental or otherwise. This is indeed a large issue to confront since it is a key reason why those in the EJ movement and others continuously turn to the settler state as a means through which to acquire the justice they seek. Pulido writes that “if environmental racism is part of racial capitalism, then its regulation becomes the province of the state” (p. 529). In the interest of maintaining firms’ competitiveness on the world market, the settler state becomes not only complicit in environmental racism but is responsible for the creation of difference and devaluation of nonwhite people that is intrinsic to racial violence. Environmental racism can be seen as inevitable under the settler state as forms of racial difference are produced to devalue communities, thus allowing the pollution and dumping of waste outputs as capital accumulates in a linear fashion. But inherent state violence and inevitability of environmental racism, as Pulido suggests, would necessitate other ways to seek justice that do not involve the settler state perpetrating the violence. Continuing to try to work through the state could be seen in many ways as a crisis of imagination. A crisis of imagination should not determine decisions to view the state as an ally or neutral force, however, as this may contribute to the failure Pulido is recognizing in EJ; that of the perpetuation of environmental racism at full force, despite the movement’s activism. Recognizing that the state is a racial capitalist state suggests an approach to EJ that sees the state “as an adversary that must be 40 confronted in a manner similar to industry” (p. 530). This is of course no easy task, but Pulido is right to assert that the potential further co-opting of the EJ movement by the settler state, through state actions of going through the motions of regulatory activity and participation, as well as EJ’s failure to not theorize environmental racism as racial capitalism, is too large a risk to take.

Extending this argument to involve Green New Deal discussions, racial capitalism cannot be resolved by “tinkering with policy,” Pulido notes (2017, p. 526). This is a central takeaway for those concerned with the large task of even getting the GND passed and implemented without any major concessions. And while the GND is definitely not to be considered as “tinkering with policy,” we can begin to think about where lines should be drawn among the policy sphere between projects deserving of the critical support of the EJ movement and those that definitely risk reproducing the same racial capitalist state that they may appear to be contesting. This is not to say that policy gains are not important and represent hard-fought victories for decolonial environmental movements per se, but rather that there should, and indeed must, be a space in between a full faith in policy and denouncement of the state. It is from this space that one can better work and theorize about moving through the climate crisis while affirming marginalized peoples’ rights to dignified lives.

Goldstein’s ethnography affirms the value of studying peo-ple’s desire to make a social impact. Cleantech participates in a dominant culture Goldstein refers to as the “entrepre-neurial savior complex” (p. 119) that cultivates and har-nesses the desire to improve the world, yet rarely challenges how “doing good” operates within and builds on historical geographies of settler colonialism and power relations or po-litical economies of racial capitalism. As Goldstein (p. 61) compellingly argues, such desires are not merely false con-sciousness; they operate in long-standing modes of imperial subjectivity and property relations, civilizationist discourse, and—what the book especially excels at showing—the co-lonial waste-conversion epistemology of “improvement.” Goldstein situates cleantech’s so-called new green spirit of capitalism within a genealogy of “planetary improvement.” The term names how cleantech and other green entrepre-neurs apprehend and enclose the world through (racial-ized) claims of planetary dominion over what needs to be fixed or saved. Planetary improvement evidences modern-izing imperatives to develop and profit from a productive landscape, as well as aspects of frontier ideology and (set-tler) colonialism’s ontological treatment of nature as waste requiring improvement. Planetary improvement promises technological salvation through asymmetries of power, sympathy, and concern: There are those who adjudicate and have the right to comment, troubleshoot, judge, tech-nologically intervene, and feel compassion, whereas others are obliged to submit, to be saved (Asad 2015). We might call this heroic enterprise white man’s burden 2.0: The bur-den of cleaning up and converting the dirty, industrial world (made by old unenlightened energy-hog capitalism 1.0) for the sake of humanity needing to be saved. This “undifferentiated humanity” is itself a colonial construct (Lowe 2015).Goldstein describes how such an imperial vision conflates U.S. interests with those of the planet, and, in the case of cleantech, frames the world’s problems in terms of the scar-city of energy, even as the material energetic footprint of imperial subjectivity remains unacknowledged. The settler spectacle of planetary improvement broadly informs ascen-dant green markets and governance that treat the planet as a knowable and controllable object or system. This co-lonial-racialized framing of the world stems from and feeds back into the dominant regime of property (Bhandar 2018). Goldstein conveys how “improvement” encloses creativity as a property relation through techno-fetishism and posses-sive neoliberal entrepreneurship (which we should situate within the racial capitalism of the tech economy more gen-erally). Goldstein contends that entrepreneurialism means submission to the community of money. The process entails an enclosure of collective creative capacity. Entrepreneurs are creative workers; investors want to transform them into employees and separate them from their products. This in-volves the conversion of the inventor to entrepreneur to employee, and a parallel process of innovations becoming owned assets and intellectual property. Inventors become “freed” from the means of production and willing to sub-ject themselves to waged labor under capital’s control.So how do we decolonize improvement and free creativity from the straitjacket of market–property relations? Gold-102 THE AAG REVIEW OF BOOKSstein concludes the book in a speculative mode that is cre-ative and pragmatic. He explores a more radical politics of technology and innovation, pluripotent intellect, amateur-ism, and redirecting creative labors toward “care-full ap-proaches.” I have been thinking with the book in another direction: connecting the entrepreneurial savior complex with the global financial system and fiscal entrepreneur-ialism. Building from Goldstein’s analysis, we can struc-turally see the lie of liquidity and reliance of capital on the manna of state budgets—whether tax base, debt base, bailouts, or all three (p. 152). Moreover, when consider-ing “just transitions,” it is clear that the choice to live and thrive with less energetic and material consumption and therefore with less formal economic activity is very differ-ent than degrowth imposed under conditions of auster-ity, such as in Puerto Rico, where the governor described the post–Hurricane Maria territory as a “blank slate” for energy conversions (i.e., privatization), or the rightsizing, downsizing, shrinking, and greening impositions on his-torically black U.S. cities. In these cases, the logic of debt asserts that people cut off from capital need to develop their own capacities and reform their backwardness (Byrd et&Sal. 2018). Goldstein’s excellent book can be put in conversation with emergent South-to-South studies and scholarship on racial capitalism to denaturalize epistemol-ogies and policies of improvement across routinized Global North–South power structures: connecting the neoliberal criminalization of “making do” and predatory fines pushed onto public services in Flint, Michigan, or Birmingham, Alabama, to the heroicized figure of the “slum entrepre-neur” in the developmentalist framework of Global South megacities. This conjunction with Goldstein’s work makes plain that decolonizing improvement requires “public provisioning”—a process that would differentiate use from property or enclosure to prioritize social uses over proper-ty’s function as an instrument of financial investment, and that would undo or redress racial regimes of ownership, debt, and deservedness.

2.2. Racial Capitalism and the Anthropocene An analysis of climate change would be incomplete without situating the anthropogenic breach of planetary boundaries in the larger context of the Anthropocene. The concept Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3626490 Gonzalez of the Anthropocene was introduced by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer (2000) to describe the unprecedented human dominance and disruption of Earth system processes essential to the flourishing of human and non-human life. The authors attributed the emergence of the Anthropocene to the destructive technologies developed by humanity and sought “to guide [hu]mankind towards, global, sustainable, environmental management” (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000, p. 18.). This undifferentiated view of humanity has been widely criticized for obscuring the underlying social and economic drivers of anthropogenic Earth system disruption, including colonial conquest, imperial dispossession and the imposition of a global capitalist order that systematically abuses nature and exploits large segments of the world’s population (Moore 2015, Haraway 2016, Baskin 2019). Some scholars propose the notion of the Capitalocene to better address the role of capitalism as the underlying cause of contemporary social and ecological crises (Moore 2016). Others have emphasized the role of racism and colonial violence as the means through which humans and nature are objectified and exploited (Yusoff 2018). Political theorist Cedric Robinson (2000) and sociologist Aníbal Quijano (2000, 2007, 2014) argue that racism and capitalism are inextricably intertwined. The extraction of wealth from nature was operationalized through slavery, the conquest and dispossession of indigenous peoples, and the colonial and postcolonial domination by white Euro-American elites of large segments of the world’s population. Robinson (2000) uses the term “racial capitalism” to denote this symbiotic relationship between racism and capitalism. He argues that capitalism emerged from a feudal order thoroughly infused with racial hierarchies, and then evolved into a world system that transforms regional and cultural differences into racial forms of domination, including slavery, imperialism and genocide. Quijano introduces the term “coloniality of power” to refer to the Eurocentric racial and cultural hierarchies and institutional forms of domination (such as the nation-state) imposed through colonialism that structure the contemporary capitalist world system – including the North-South divide. These hierarchies persist long after the departure of the colonial administration, and continue to structure economic and social relations (Quijano 2000, 2007). Scholars in a variety of disciplines have extended Quijano’s definition of the coloniality of power to encompass the interlocking systems of oppression that constitute the capitalist world system, including those that privilege core (North) over periphery (South), men over women, Christians over non-Christians, Europeans over non-Europeans, heterosexuals over homosexuals, and Western knowledge over non-Western knowledge (Grosfoguel 2006). What distinguishes this decolonial perspective from Robinson’s approach is that it emphasizes race and racism as a cross-cutting principle of the capitalist world system while also recognizing other intersecting forms of subordination (Grosfoguel 2016). For example, racial hierarchies shape the national and international division of labour, consigning those constructed as non-white to the most dirty and dangerous forms of employment (Fraser 2016, Bhattacharyya 2018, Faber 2018). Similarly, gender hierarchies relegate women to unpaid domestic labour including cooking, cleaning, and raising children that reproduces the workforce (Bhattacharyya 2018). Hyper-exploited racialized women generally perform the waged domestic and care work that enables more privileged Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3626490 Racial capitalism… women to enter elite labour markets in addition to performing unpaid domestic labour in their own homes (Battacharya 2018). In other words, race and gender hierarchies intersect, conferring greater status on some white women than many non-white men, and generally placing non-white women in a subordinate position in relation to both groups (Crenshaw 1989, Grosfoguel 2006). While informed by the insights of critical race theory, including scholars of intersectionality, this article adopts a structural approach to race and racism grounded in political economy. Building on the work of Quijano and Robinson, the article examines the ways that capitalism deploys race and racism as techniques of exclusion and control, creating expendable geographic locations (sacrifice zones) and expendable people. As planetary boundaries continue to be breached (Steffen et al. 2015), racialized populations, including those displaced by climate change, will be exposed to increasing levels of violence and exclusion. Racism is thus not simply a form of bias or discrimination, but an integral part of a world system that subjects growing segments of the world’s population to precarity and premature death. The term “racism” is used in this article to refer to the degradation and objectification of human beings based on a variety of indicators, most commonly physical characteristics (such as skin colour), but also ethnicity, indigeneity, culture, caste, language, religion, geographic location, and geographic origin (Grosfoguel 2016). Racialization is the process through which specific bodies are classified as superior or inferior based on the distinct set of markers adopted in a region or nation at a particular time (Grosfoguel et al. 2014). Which groups are racialized and the narrative that accompanies that racialization varies substantially across place and time in relation to changing economic and political conditions (Reed 2013). For example, some groups that are currently recognized as white (such as Jews and the Irish) have a long history of being classified as non-white (Ignatiev 1995, Brodkin 1998). Racial hierarchies serve distinct economic objectives and maintain population-specific modes of control. In the US, for example, the founding logic of anti-Black racism was labour exploitation (Saito 2014, Wolfe 2016). When slavery was abolished, other mechanisms of exploitation and control became dominant, including share-cropping, debt peonage, convict-leasing, lynching, and segregation (Sassen 2014, Wolfe 2016). By contrast, the logic of anti-Native racism was the elimination of the Native in order to appropriate indigenous lands (Saito 2014). Consequently, settler-colonial states like the US, Australia and Canada sought to dissolve Native societies and extirpate Native land claims through genocide and various forms of ethnocide, including “the breaking-down of Native title into alienable individual freeholds, Native citizenship, child abduction, religious conversion, resocialisation in total institutions such as missions or boarding schools, and a whole range of bio-cultural assimilations” (Wolfe 2016, p. 33). Eurocentric racial and cultural hierarchies correspond, at least in part, to Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ notion of the “abyssal line” demarcating those deemed fully human from those deemed less than human (Santos 2014). Conflicts involving those on one side of the abyssal line are managed through discourses of liberty, equality and autonomy. Those on the other side of the abyssal line are treated as non-humans/sub-humans and occupy a zone of violence and dispossession (Grosfoguel 2016). As Sundberg (2008, p. Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3626490 Gonzalez 570) observes, “[r]acial thinking provides a powerful rationale for why inequalities and injustices between groups of people are socially and legally acceptable”. This article focuses on the subordination of those below the abyssal line while recognizing that abyssal and non-abyssal exclusions coexist and that some groups cross between these two forms of exclusion in their daily lives. Santos (2018) provides examples that illustrate the distinction between abyssal and non-abyssal exclusion. First example: In a predominantly white society, a young Black man in secondary school (…) may well consider himself excluded, whether because he is often avoided by his schoolmates or because the syllabus deals with materials that are insulting to the culture or history of peoples of African descent. Nonetheless, such exclusions are not abyssal; he is part of the same student community and, at least in theory, has access to mechanisms that will enable him to argue against discrimination. On the other hand, when the same young man on his way back home is stopped by the police, evidently due to ethnic profiling and is violently beaten, at such a moment, the young man crosses the abyssal line. (Santos 2018, p. 22) The abyssal line operates on a global scale between centres and peripheries – the North and South. It also operates within nations. In the global North, indigenous peoples, racial and ethnic minorities and immigrants from the global South are disproportionately classified as subhuman or non-human. In the global South, Westernized elites frequently engage in internal colonialism, reproducing racist practices against particular social groups (Grosfoguel et al. 2014, Gonzalez 2015). The abyssal line is perhaps most evident in the zones of extreme violence and degradation, such as Guantánamo, Darfur, Iraq, Palestine, and Yemen. It is also evident in the prisons and migrant detention camps of the global North (Santos 2014). The distinction between abyssal and non-abyssal exclusion is not grounded in the intensity of the pain and deprivation experienced by individual or collective bodies, but “refers to the indifference with which suffering is inflicted, indifference meaning both cold-bloodedness and impunity” (Santos 2018, p. 95). The regulation of migration is “among the most consistently racialized practices of most contemporary states” (Bhattacharyya 2018, p. 129). European nations and settler-colonial states historically encouraged European mobility while restricting the movement of persons classified as non-white. Between 1800 and 1925, for example, approximately 48 million Europeans migrated to New Zealand, Australia, Argentina, South Africa, and the United States as a consequence of migration policies designed to “whiten” these states and territories (Massey 2000). During the same period, the newly sovereign states in the Americas adopted a series of laws and policies to reduce the migration of racialized populations, including head taxes, outright prohibitions (such as the infamous 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act in the United States), and racially coded naturalization and immigration policies (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018). Australia adopted a “White Australia Policy” in 1904, and banned migration from Africa, Southeast Asia, and South Asia (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018). In the decades following World War II, the demographic composition of Europe and the US changed due to migratory flows from the global South, challenging Euro-American white national identity (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018). Until the 1960s, the US imposed racially discriminatory national origin quotas on new migrants that favored Northern Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3626490 Racial capitalism… Europeans (Tichenor 2002). When these quotas were lifted, migration from Asia, Africa, and Latin America increased significantly – triggered by war, poverty, and neoliberal economic reforms (Gonzalez 2011). European States also grew more racially and ethnically diverse due to the influx of racialized citizens from the former colonies and migrant laborers recruited from Turkey, Morocco and elsewhere (Telford 2018, Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018). Notwithstanding these demographic changes, the current “refugee crisis” has revealed the profound racial animus against persons classified as non-white. In Europe, the US and other settler-colonial nations, the population is generally divided “between those whose movement is a manifestation of liberty, and should therefore be maximized, and those whose freedom is a problem, and should therefore be tightly regulated” (Kotef 2015, p. 100). While corporations freely roam the world, racialized bodies are policed, detained, incarcerated, and deported (Sheller 2018). This racialized abyssal line has profound implications for climate-induced migration. The following section draws upon these insights to expand our understanding of climate justice. 2.3. Racial Capitalism and Climate Change An analysis of climate change through the lens of racial capitalism and coloniality reveals additional aspects of climate injustice that are obscured by the four-part definition articulated in this article (distributive, procedural, corrective, and social). In order to appreciate the full extent of climate injustice, it is important to examine the ways that race is inscribed in the history of carbon capitalism and the sacrifice zones of both the fossil fuel economy and the emerging green energy economy. First, the colonization of the Americas and the transatlantic slave trade established the material and ideological foundations of capitalism – a system based on extraction, accumulation through dispossession, and white supremacy (Davis and Todd 2017, Yusoff 2018). The Anthropocene is the epoch under which ‘humanity’ – but more accurately, petrochemical companies and those invested in and profiting from petrocapitalism and colonialism – have had such a large impact on the planet that radionuclides, coal, plutonium, plastic, concrete, genocide and other markers are now visible in the geologic strata. (Davis and Todd 2017, p. 765; emphasis added) The genocide of the indigenous populations of the Americas in the 1500s was so massive (nearly 50 million deaths) that farming collapsed and forests rebounded. The forests removed such large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere as to cause a significant dip in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in the 1600s, measurable in Antarctic ice cores – leading Lewis and Maslin (2015, pp. 175-177) to propose 1610 as the beginning of the Anthropocene. This early marker of the Anthropocene coincided with the importation of slave labour to extract gold, silver and copper and later the sugar and cotton that fueled the Industrial Revolution (Yusoff 2018, pp. 29-33). Starting the Anthropocene at 1610 captures all impacts of the Industrial Revolution, which many scientists and historians consider a key part of the Anthropocene – because European annexing of the Americas was an essential factor in providing food energy and raw material imports that were critical elements allowing an Industrial Revolution to take place. (Lewis and Maslin 2018, p. 319) Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3626490 Gonzalez Colonization and slavery were therefore central rather than peripheral to the Industrial Revolution and the birth of carbon capitalism (Williams 1994, Beckert 2014, Blackburn 1997, Yusoff 2018). Second, the “slow violence” inflicted by the fossil fuel industry on racialized and poor communities throughout the world remains a central feature of contemporary capitalism (Nixon 2013, Soyapi and Kotzé 2016). The extraction, processing, transportation, refining and combustion of fossil fuels has placed disproportionate environmental burdens on racialized communities in the global North and South. From the Niger Delta to the Canadian tar sands and the countless communities living in the shadow of polluting petrochemical facilities and power plants, the life cycle impacts of fossil fuels include eviction from ancestral lands; desecration of sacred sites; poisoning of air, land, and water; fires, explosions, and industrial accidents; loss of subsistence fishing and hunting rights; and exposure to significant health hazards (Klein 2014). Local and transnational environmental justice struggles against coal mining, petroleum drilling, fracking, oil and gas pipelines, and polluting refineries and power plants are thus inextricably intertwined with the struggle for climate justice. Third, fossil fuels are concentrated in particular countries and regions such as the Middle East that have been targeted over and over for invasion, occupation, and exploitation. The North’s bloody resource wars, its collusion with despotic petro-states, and the resulting death, destruction and displacement of racialized Muslim and Arab populations are amongst the most violent ongoing manifestations of climate injustice (Klare 2004, Natarajan 2012, Klein 2016). When persons displaced by these conflicts seek refuge in the global North, they are branded as potential terrorists and subjected to restrictive border controls, including the notorious “Muslim ban” on travel to the US from certain predominantly Muslim countries (Liptak and Shear 2018, Telford 2018). Fourth, those most susceptible to climate-related disasters and slow-onset events are overwhelmingly persons classified as non-white (Haas Institute 2017, Pulido 2018). They reside in locations such as low-lying coastal zones, small island states, and agriculturedependent nations disproportionately exposed to hurricanes, floods, drought, desertification and rising sea levels (Anand 2004). In addition, they have been rendered socially and economically vulnerable to climate change by the North’s economic and military interventions. The North’s “under-development” of the global South during the colonial and postcolonial era, so eloquently described by Walter Rodney (1972) and Eduardo Galeano (1997), has been exacerbated by decades of neoliberal economic reforms imposed initially by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and subsequently through regional and multilateral trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties (Gonzalez 2015). These reforms increased poverty; reduced access to health care, education, and other social services; undermined the development of climate-resilient urban and rural infrastructure; created mass displacement; and deprived states and communities of resources for climate adaptation and disaster response and recovery (Haas Institute 2017, Saad 2017). Finally, racialized communities in the global South are being displaced not only by climate change, military interventions and neoliberal economic policies, but also by the measures deployed to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. For example, wind farms are being developed in Oaxaca, Mexico on indigenous lands to provide energy to Walmart, Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3626490 Racial capitalism… Coca-Cola, Heineken and Cemex (a Mexican cement manufacturer) without public debate; adequate compensation; free, prior and informed consent; equitable sharing of benefits with local communities; and mechanisms to provide compensation for damage and loss to land (Baker 2015, Zárate-Toledo et al. 2019). In Canada, a controversial proposal to build an enormous hydroelectric dam on the Peace River threatens to displace indigenous peoples and replicate the sacrifice zones of carbon capitalism – this time in the name of “green energy” (Scott and Smith 2017). In Brazil and throughout the global South, forest conservation schemes developed through the climate regime’s Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) mechanism undermine the rights of local and indigenous communities to harvest plants, timber, or fish in their ancestral territories (Klein 2014, Kronk Warner 2015). Lastly, legislation in the US and the EU mandating the blending of biofuels into transportation fuels has increased food prices and incentivized large-scale land transactions in the global South that destroy forests and displace rural dwellers in order to make way for large plantations to cultivate biofuel feedstocks (such as oil palm). These mandates remain in place even though the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions of many biofuels exceed those of the fossil fuels they replace (Gonzalez 2016). An analysis of climate change grounded in the coloniality of power reveals a key thread that unites these abuses – the abyssal line dividing those deemed human from those deemed non-human or sub-human. While everyone is vulnerable to climate change, those who occupy the sacrifice zones of racial capitalism are particularly susceptible to harm due to their classification as sub-human and disposable. Racialization justifies and naturalizes violence and dispossession in war zones, in resource extraction zones, in the green energy economy, and in the refugee camps and migrant detention centers of the global North. As Naomi Klein candidly observes: A culture that places so little value on black and brown lives that it is willing to let human beings disappear beneath the waves, or set themselves on fire in detention centres, will also be willing to let the countries where black and brown people live disappear beneath the waves, or desiccate in the arid heat. When that happens, theories of human hierarchy – that we must take care of our own first – will be marshalled to rationalize these monstrous decisions. (Klein 2016, p. 9) Even though they have uprooted “the darker races” (Du Bois 1900/2007) throughout the world through the ecological and economic crises of colonialism, militarism and predatory capitalism, Northern governments use a variety of border controls to exclude “those whose very recourse to migration results from the ravages of capital and military occupations” (Walia 2013, p. 5). For those below the abyssal line, racism is not simply prejudice or discrimination, but “state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (Gilmore 2007, p. 28). International law has been deeply complicit in the project of racial capitalism. As Antony Anghie (2004) explains, international law originates in the colonial encounter and has been used to justify successive Northern interventions in the global South through a variety of doctrines – including terra nullius, the doctrine of discovery, the mandate system, trusteeship, modernization, development, good governance, humanitarian intervention and pre-emptive self-defense. International law has depicted Southern peoples as so primitive, savage, uncivilized, backward, and under-developed that their Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3626490 Gonzalez lives, livelihoods, and cultures are unworthy of protection (Anghie 2004, Gonzalez 2015). This history raises serious questions about the ability of the climate regime to secure climate justice for racialized communities displaced by climate change.

Renewables Revolution: Green Colonialism and Clean-Tech Industries. We have seen the consequences for those who question the status quo in one of the most “sustainable ecovillages” in this country. This binary driven fundamentalism also undergirds our environmental movements. In addition to their history of racism, an insidious strain of orthodoxy dictates these movements. We are prohibited from questioning their ideologies—in this case, the Renewables Revolution and its perceived alternative energies.49 As with our shift from our systemically racist culture to one rooted in mutual respect for multiplicity and difference, we must practice caution during our transition out of our global petroculture. This vigilance should not be based on the motivation, but on the underlying false assumptions and strategies that perceived sustainability and agendas offer. The implicit assumptions embedded in the concept of equality emulate those of sustainability: maintaining the status quo. At this juncture of geopolitical, ecological, social, and corporeal catastrophes, we must critically question clean/green solutions such as the erroneously-named Renewable Energies Revolution. I suggest we face both the roots and the implications of how perceived solutions to our climate crisis, like “renewable” energies, may unintentionally sustain ecological devastation and global wealth inequities, and actually divert us from establishing long-term, regenerative infrastructures. On the surface, sustainability agendas appear to offer critical shifts toward an ecologically, economically, and ethically sound society, but there is much evidence to suggest that #1: these structural changes must be accompanied by a psychological shift in individuals’ behavior to effectively shut down consumer-waste convenience culture; and, #2: the core of too many green/clean solutions is rooted in the very essence of our climate crisis: privatized, industrialized-corporate capitalism. For example, Cheyftz alerts us: The Green New Deal is a “capitalist solution to a capitalist problem.” It claims to address the linked oppressions of wealth inequity and climate-crisis, yet its proposed solutions avoid the very roots of each crisis. My challenge is rooted in three interrelated inquiries: 1. How are our daily choices reinforcing the very racist systems we are questioning or even trying to dismantle? 2. How are the alternatives to fossil-fuel economies and environmental racism reinforcing the very systems we are questioning or even trying to dismantle? 3. What can we learn from indigenous philosophies and socialist ecofeminist movements in order to establish viable, sustainable, regenerative infrastructures—an Ecozoic Era? As we transition to supposedly carbon-free electricity, we must be attentive to the ways in which we unconsciously manifest the very racist hegemonies we seek to dislodge; we must be cautious of the greening-of capitalism that manifests as “green colonialism” through a new dependency on what is falsely identifed as “renewable” energies. Currently, human and natural-world habitat destruction are implicit in the mass production and disposal infrastructures of most “renewable energies:” solar, wind, biomass/biofuels, geothermal, ethanol, hydrogen, nuclear, and other ostensible renewables.50 This includes our technocratic petroleum-pharmaceutical addictions that use technologies to create “equality”. Even if policy appears to be in alignment with environmental ethics, we are consistently fnding that policy change simply replaces one hegemony with another—particularly within the framework of neoliberal globalization. Only when we acknowledge the roots of our Western imperialist crisis, can we begin to decolonize and revitalize all peoples’ livelihoods and their environments. Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era, my climate justice book that explores the perils of the Anthropocene, challenges cultural habits deeply embedded in our calamitous trajectory toward global ecological and cultural, ethnic collapse. The book’s main character refects: “We have this crazy idea that anything ‘green’ is good—but we know that there is no clear-cut good and evil. What happens when the very solution causes more problems than the original problem it was supposed to fx?” How we measure our ecological footprint and global biocapacity is often riddled with paradox—particularly in the face of green colonialism, or what I call humanitarian imperialism. The litany of our collusion with corporate forms of domination is infnite within the Anthropocene Era (increasingly characterized as the Plasticene). Disinformation campaigns spread by fossil-fuel interests deeply root us in assimilationist consumerism. The Zazu Dreams’ characters witness social and environmental costs of subjugating others through both fossil-fuel-obsessed economies and their “green” replacements. Vaclav Smil warns us of this “Miasma of falsehood.” This implies replacing one destructive socializing norm—petropharma cultures sustained by fossil-fuel addicted economics—with another: purportedly “renewable” energies. These energies (I don’t call them renewable, because they are not renewable and not carbon-free),51 like fossil-fuels, are rooted in barbaric colonialist extractive industries. Once again, the “solution” is precisely the problem. Greenwashing is a prime example of the ways in which capitalism dictates our alleged freedom. The “green economy has come to mean … the wholesale privatization of nature.”52 Consumerism becomes the default for making supposedly ethical choices. In Deep Green Resistance, Lierre Keith urges us: “We can’t consume our way out of environmental collapse. Consumption is the problem.”53 Even within the 99%, consumers are capitalism. Without convenienceculture/mass consumer-demand, the machine of the proft-driven free market would have to shift gears. We can’t blame oil companies without simultaneously implicating ourselves, holding our consumption-habits equally responsible. How can we insist government and transnational corporations be accountable, when we refuse to curb our buying, using, and disposal habits? We don’t have to travel far in our cross-cultural histories of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience to learn from worldchanging examples of strikes, unions, boycotts, expropriation, infrastructural sabotage, embargoes, and divestment protests. Yet, most contemporary transition movements are founded in the very system they are trying to dismantle. Our perceived resources, these alternative forms of energy proposed to power our public electrical grids, are misidentifed under the misleading misnomers: labels such “renewable”/“sustainable”/“clean”/“green”. How is “clean” defined? For whom? There is not a clear division between clean energy and dirty energy/dirty power—clean isn’t always clean. Neoliberal denial of corporeal and global interrelationships instills conformist laws of conduct that continually replenish our toxic soup in which we all live. One perceived solution to help us transition is to create alternatives to fossil fuel-addicted economies, as proposed, for example, through The Green New Deal and its focus on allegedly “renewable” energies. However well-intentioned, these supposed alternatives perpetuate the violence of wasteful behavior and destructive infrastructures. Even if temporarily abated, they ultimately conserve the original crisis. Below I address technologies falsely identifed as “renewable” energies that actually reinforce the very problem they are trying to solve. 1. Solar/Photovoltaic and Wind Technologies: Given proposed solutions using industrial solar and wind harvesting, Western imperialism will continue to dominate global relations. Solar cell and storage production and disposal infrastructure (mining and other extractive industries) as well as industrial wind farms (turbines54 and their infrastructure) use exorbitant resources to produce and implement. Wind and solar energies require vast quantities of fossil fuels to execute them on a grand scale. As we have seen throughout California and China (two examples among many), massive solar-energy sites/ solar industrial complexes strip land bare—displacing human populations and migration routes of both wildlife and people for acres of solar felds, substations, and access roads—all of which require incredibly carbon-intensive concrete.55 Consuming massive tracts of land, 100–1000 times more land area is required for wind and solar, as well as for biofuel energy production than does fossil-fuel production. This is a prime example of replacing one hegemony with another. 2. Hydro-Power Technology: Large-scale dams for hydro-power have historically had cataclysmic effects on indigenous peoples and their lands. Although macro-hydro, like fracking, has fnally been recognized for its calamitous consequences, perversely, it is still proposed as a viable alternative to fossil-fuel economies. 3. Battery Technology: According to the Union of Concerned Scientists and their Climate Vulnerability Index (CVI) in California, fne particulate pollution harms African-American communities 43% more than predominantly white communities, Latinx 39% more, and Asian-American communities 21% more (21). As if tailpipe emissions are the only humanitarian catastrophe, one “clean solution” is the electric vehicle for public transportation and for personal consumption. Completely ignoring embodied energy, this perceived 54 “Blenders in the sky” devastate migrating wildlife—bats and birds critical to healthy ecosystems, some of whom are endangered species. 55Concrete has an extremely high embodied energy solution displaces the costs of environmental racism—once again exported out of the US into the global south—in this case to Bolivia where lithium (essential for battery production) is primarily mined. The Renewable Energy Movement claims that our global addiction to oil (“black gold”) should be replaced by lithium (“white gold”). What we are not considering is that extracting lithium and converting it to a commercially viable form consumes copious quantities of water—drastically depleting availability for indigenous communities and wildlife, and produces toxic waste (that includes an already growing history of chemical leaks poisoning rivers, thus people and other animals). Cobalt, also essential for battery production, is mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Like lithium, cobalt’s environmental and humanitarian costs are unconscionable, perpetuated by wanton corruption—including habitat destruction, child slavery, and death. Additionally: 5. Solar technologies and battery e-waste are dumped throughout Asia, South America, and Africa. 6. Rarely considered are the fossil-fuel sources used to supply the electricity for private and public electric vehicles. Too frequently, the poorest US populations work and live near coal mines/power plants/fracking station sources. 7. Furthermore, these “renewable” energies are low-power density: they produce very little energy in proportion to the energy required to institutionalize them. As the main character in Zazu Dreams prompts: “Even if we fnd great alternatives to fossil fuels, what if renewable energies become big business and just maintain our addiction to consumption? (…) Replacing tar sands or oil-drills or coal power plants with megalithic ‘green’ energy is not the solution—it just masks the original problem—confusing ‘freedom’ with free market and free enterprise.”56 We must now act on our knowledge that the renewable “revolution” is dangerously carbon intensive. And, as the authors of Deep Green Resistance caution us: “The new world of renewables will look exactly like the old in terms of exploitation.”5

The bottom line: capitalism is antithetical to sustainability A fundamental part in developing critical sustainability is judiciously assessing the drivers of modern ecological concerns. The Earth system has distinct planetary boundaries—such as those associated with climate change, biodiversity, ocean acidification, and nitrogen and phosphorus cycles (Lenton et al. 2008; Rockström et al. 2009; Steffen et al. 2015). These boundaries suggest specific material limits that should not be transgressed to ensure long-term sustainability. Furthermore, these conditions represent cycles and processes that act as the foundation for life as we know it, preceding any social system (Malm 2018). It is commonly understood that the economy is a subset operating within the larger biophysical world, which involves all productive activities. Often, it is assumed that the existing economy can be tweaked, directed, and organized to protect the conditions that support life, promote equity, enhance well-being, and operate within planetary boundaries (Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015; Mol 1995, 2001; Spaargaren 1997). Under such scenarios, technological innovation is often presented as a central means toward “decoupling” economic growth from environmental degradation, allowing capital to thrive while depending on fewer ecological inputs (Huber 2009; Mol 2002). Popular media figures, such as social commentator and journalist Thomas Friedman, propose mobilizing market mechanisms as the primary method to develop a more sustainable economy. Friedman (2009: 291) notes “there is only one thing bigger than Mother Nature, and that is Father Profit.” He explains that the creation of the “green economy” greaxztly expands opportunities for profit-making activity. In fact, quoting a director at an investment company, he argues it is “the mother of all markets, the economic investment opportunity of a lifetime…. The challenge of global warming presents us all with the greatest opportunity for return on investment and growth that any of us will ever see” (Friedman 2009: 212). This position is deeply entrenched within mainstream economics, as sustainability is defined in terms of economic growth, monetary wealth, and consumption, without any serious consideration of ecological conditions (Pearce 1993). These approaches to sustainability assume that the capitalist mode of production is synonymous with the economic leg of the sustainability stool. Doing so ignores alternative ways of organizing productive society that are bound by different structural determinants and eliminates the critical assessment of capitalist development as an important social driver of environmental degradation. Thus, the socioecological dynamics of capital are naturalized—or taken for granted—conflating its growth as an inevitable part of human society, instead of as a historically emergent set of social relationships. Political economists Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy (1996: C3), distressed by such ahistorical conceptualizations and myopic arguments, maintained, “All this talk about growth as good and faster growth as better, leaves out the truly important questions: Do we need growth? If so, what kind of growth? And…how about at least beginning to talk about an economy/society that rejects permanent growth as the oxymoron it obviously is and focuses on the really important issues of human and planetary existence?” The capital system is predicated on the constant expansion of profits. This is its bottom line. It is well known that, for any capitalist enterprise to remain viable over time, the value on the bottom line of the financial balance sheet must be greater than the previous period’s accounting. Economist Joseph Schumpeter (1962: 81-86, 418-19) explained that due to the growth imperative of capital, this system can never be stationary. In order to continually encourage the accumulation of capital, it must operate on an ever-increasing scale. Its “creative destruction,” which involves competitive innovation, obsolescence, renewal, and expansion, provides unparalleled productive power, dynamism, and growth. Commodity production serves as a basis to expand exchange value and to capture surplus value (gross profits) (Heilbroner 1985: 36; Marx 1976: 247-57). Heterodox economist E. F. Schumacher (1973: 255) explains that “the strength of the idea of private enterprise lies in its terrifying simplicity. It suggests that the totality of life can be reduced to one aspect—profits.” Thus, capitalist accounting reduces the world merely to a narrow, unidimensional quantitative measure, whereby success is determined by its exponential increase of profit. Qualitative social relations, including concerns regarding justice and well-being, are not part of this accounting (Burkett 1999). As far as capital is concerned, Sweezy (2004: 86-93) explained, the environment serves largely “as a means to the paramount ends of profit-making and still more capital accumulation.” Thus, in interrogating the capital system, we can better reveal the central drivers of socioecological dynamics. The historical development of capitalism is rooted in generating an array of social inequalities, increasingly on a global scale. Karl Marx (1973, 1976) detailed how the primary accumulation associated with the historical rise of the capital system involved the separation and expropriation of people from the land. Expropriation involves the dissolution of earlier customary rights and productive relations. It is a system of robbery and domination whereby the majority of the population’s means of livelihood are privatized, and thus dispossessed (Foster and Clark 2018a). Land was seized through legal actions, such as the English enclosure movement, and physical force, as in case of European colonialism. Dispossessed peoples, such as peasants, were impelled into a social position that required them to sell their labor power. That is, the new laboring class needed to earn wages to purchase their means of subsistence. Wage labor, a social relation that is very common today, was making its way onto the social scene, and this process was filled with resistance, conflict, and casualties (Polanyi 1957). This system of global expropriation is intimately bound to a racialized system of accumulation (Dawson 2016; Du Bois 1992; Fraser 2018: Johnson 2017). Historian Roxanne Dubar-Ortiz (2014) explains that the “Doctrine of Discovery” was used throughout the long sixteenth century to the mid-twentieth century to justify robbing the lands of indigenous peoples in the Americas (see also Tigar 2000). It was claimed that these populations simply occupied land, but did not own it since they had not “improved” it. In the USA, this step was the first in a series of wars, treaties, and settler-colonial policies that created the reservation system and tried to exterminate these peoples (Dunbar-Ortiz 2014; Horne 2018; Whyte 2016, 2017). Additionally, the expropriation of land and peoples, via the enslavement of Africans and the creation of plantation systems throughout colonies, created an empire of cotton that provided raw materials and wealth that helped spur the development of industrial capitalism (Baptist 2016; Beckert 2014; Williams 1994). Historian Walter Johnson (2017) indicates that slavery was a central component of the development of capitalism, giving rise to a distinct racial system that dehumanized non-white peoples, which served to shape and justify inequalities and continues to affect present-day questions regarding social and environmental justice. Through these imperialist relationships and conditions, a global hierarchy of nations—with distinct divisions between the global North and South—was founded in the then emerging global capitalist economy. Within capitalist development, profits and inequality become inseparable. Marx (1975) provided a systematic analysis of capital accumulation, illuminating how surplus value was produced through the exploitation of labor. Due to processes of expropriation, workers must sell their labor power, whereby wages are paid for a specific number of hours of toil. The working day consists of necessary labor and surplus labor. The former entails the portion of day when workers reproduce the value of labor, which is equivalent to the total wages to be paid. The latter is the portion of the day when workers produce surplus value. Profits are the residual, consisting of the money remaining after wages and other expenses are paid. Once commodities are sold, capitalists recover the money spent on wages, plus the surplus. These profits are reinvested, expanding production and surplus generation (Burkett 1999). Workers spend wages to support themselves. Capitalists invest in methods of production, including new technologies, to expand operations and to lower labor costs, just as they pursue manufacturing in low-wage countries to increase profits (Braverman 1998; Foster et al. 2011; Marx 1976; Smith 2016). The owning class controls the social surplus produced by society as a whole, and determines how it will be distributed (Resnick and Wolff 1981). Under this division of labor and structure of the productive economy, vast class differences within and between nations emerge, as capitalists accumulate evermore wealth, through the exploitation of workers, advancing multiple aspects of social discord. In addition to capturing the value produced through commodity production, following the system’s own logic of accounting, capital expropriates unpaid social reproductive work as a “free gift” to itself (Marx and Engels 1975, vol. 37: 732-33). This work is a necessary background condition that sustains life. Within a capital system, social reproduction and economic production became constituted as separate spheres. While the former also creates use values, it does this outside of the paid labor process and remains in the hidden abodes of capitalism (Fraser 2014, 2016). Social reproduction includes a broad range of productive and sustenance activities that help maintain people, including tending to such things as health and well-being, child care, general education, and food production (Bhattacharya 2017). This work becomes appended to the capital system, as it helps reproduce labor, decreasing the costs of labor. But it is not seen as productive under capitalist accounting because it does not directly produce profit (Waring 1999). While women have always participated in the paid work force, and they were the majority of the laborers in the central industries associated with the Industrial Revolution, where they received much lower wages than men, they have been disproportionately responsible for social reproductive work (Berg 1991, 1993; Foster and Clark 2018b; Fraser 2017). Social reproduction scholars, such as Nancy Fraser, present how expropriation and exploitation operate in tandem, tracing the different historical configurations and interactions between these spheres, in the modern capitalist system, which creates distinct layers of inequalities. For example, Fraser notes that there is a care gap in modern society. As relatively privileged women pursue professional careers, migrant women are hired to provide familial care, resulting in the latter needing others to cover such reproductive work with regard to their own families (Brenner 2000; Folbre 2001; Fraser 2017). The ripple effect of these relationships often crosses borders in the hierarchy of nations. Clearly, capitalism is not the only contributing factor to social inequalities. However, its basic operations actively create and intensify inequities. The accumulation of capital fundamentally relies upon producing social disparities. The specific conditions, patterns, scale, and scope of these inequalities have varied depending on the historical development of capital, social movements, legislation, and geopolitics, just to name a few considerations. What remains clear is that complex systems of oppression related to race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality have become woven into the very fabric of the global capital system (Clark et al. 2018; Davis 1998; Pellow 2007, 2016). As a result, a broad array of environmental inequalities and injustice is ever present within and between countries (Bell 2013; Downey and Hawkins 2008; Edwards and Driscoll 2009; Faber 2008; Frey 2003; Gedicks 1993; Harrison 2008; Hormel and Norgaard 2009; Mohai et al. 2009; Pellow 2007; Peluso 1992; Peña 1998; Pulido 1996). The basic operations of capital also undermine any meaningful conception of sustainability, as far as the environment is concerned. As a growth-dependent economic system, the ceaseless pursuit of profit and expansion has “direct implications for natural resource extraction,” pollution generation, and overall environmental conditions (Gould et al. 2004: 297). Each expansion in commodity production increases the amount of resources (i.e., matter and energy) required to support production (Foster 2000, 2002; Schnaiberg 1980). Capitalists reinvest profits to enlarge the scale of production and to intensify operations, further escalating the overall demands placed on the Earth System (Burkett 1999; Foster 1994; Gould et al. 2008; Schnaiberg and Gould 1994). This never-ending dictate results in capital expropriating environmental inputs throughout the world, creating degradation on a scale and category never seen in human history (Foster et al. 2010; Sweezy 2004). Additionally, energy-intensive materials, such as plastics and chemicals, have been widely incorporated into manufacturing, expanding the range of waste and pollution that producers externalize to the broader society, generating qualitatively distinct forms of environmental problems. While technological innovation often makes energy and raw material usage more efficient, it does not necessarily dematerialize society or contribute to an absolute decoupling of economic growth from environmental degradation. For example, in capitalist enterprises, efficient operations produce savings that often expand investment in production—either internally or within the larger economic system—which contribute to an aggregate increase in total energy consumed and materials used. As a result, increases in overall consumption of energy and resources outstrips gains made in efficiency—a phenomenon known as the Jevons paradox (Clark and Foster 2001; Jevons 1906; Jorgenson 2009; Polimeni et al. 2008). The growth imperative of capital is geared to maximize throughput of energy and matter, preventing conservation at the macro scale of the economy. Thus, purely technological means cannot solve ecological problems (York and Clark 2010a, b). The expropriation of nature by capital has resulted in the squandering of the earth and its systems. Excessive demands—whether in the form of extraction or as pollution—placed on ecosystems are linked to capital’s ceaseless growth requirements. These actions disrupt, or rupture, natural cycles and flows, as well as exceed the regenerative capacity of ecosystems (Burkett 1999; Foster 1999; Foster et al. 2010; Schnaiberg 1980). For example, modern agriculture is organized in a way that results in the depletion of soil nutrients from the land as food and fiber are transferred to distant markets, without recirculating the nutrients back to the fields (Clausen et al. 2015; Foster 2000; Mancus 2007). As a result, energy-intensive synthetic fertilizers are used to maintain food production, causing additional environmental problems such as nutrient overloading in riparian systems, without actually addressing the cause of the ecological rift in the soil nutrient cycle. A similar situation is evident in the collapse of global fisheries, as fish are captured at a faster rate than they can reproduce (Longo 2011, 2012; Longo and Clausen 2011; Longo et al. 2015). Accumulation takes precedence over maintaining the conditions of reproduction. Capital does not have an internal mechanism or brake to check its environmentally destructive tendencies. Price, which is the primary determinant of value within capitalism, does not account for the multidimensionality and irreversible character of natural processes and the limits associated with natural systems and cycles (Burkett 1999). Market mechanisms, such as a rise in the price of a resource, do not necessarily deter increased extraction and consumption. In fact, in some instances, “higher resource prices may actually accelerate a resource’s depletion by spurring technological advances that reduce extraction costs and/or lower the amount of the resource needed per unit of final goods, thereby encouraging its further use to increase total output” (Burkett 2009: 124). By focusing primarily on price, the conditions necessary for the operation of natural cycles and processes are easily marginalized, leading to the deterioration of ecological conditions. In fact, degradation can serve as another realm of profit-making, such as in regard to waste management and efforts to create carbon markets. Given that the capital system is global, the scale and intensity of this operations takes place at all levels, including transgressing against the planetary boundaries. If we take the three-legged stool model of sustainability seriously, and actually consider the structural imperatives of capital, it becomes clear that—in its current form—one of the legs fundamentally undermines the other two. Capital, with its growth requirements, depends upon expropriation and exploitation. As a historically distinct political-economic system, it continually incorporates greater parts of the world, producing social inequality and ecological degradation on a global scale. The need for critical sustainability Economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi explained that the historical development of capital involved the creation of a “market society” that subordinated all aspects of social life to economic growth and capital accumulation. He stressed that this “was perhaps the weirdest of all the undertakings of our ancestors” (Polanyi 1957: 187). The economic system came to be conceived of as an autonomous self-governing force, divorced from socioecological relationships and concerns. In time, economic development, often measured in terms of increasing gross domestic product (even though it does not account for inequality, well-being, or ecological conditions), was seen as synonymous with social progress. Economic growth was determined to be the primary basis for improving quality and quantity, expanding goods and services, and improving lives. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith (2004) pointed out that this uncritical conception of the economy has been fraudulent. He explains that capitalism was renamed as “the market system,” which is a “meaningless designation,” as it is depicted as if its operations are impersonal and there are no classes. In other words, it lacks history. This fraud is widespread. In an assessment of the field, critical economists Joan Robinson (1962) and Robert Heilbroner (1996) explain that the word capitalism rarely appears in economic articles and textbooks. Instead, the market economy is presented without any historical perspective, void of political-economic power. Critiques of capital are dismissed as merely ideological arguments, rather than systematic analyses of its actual operations. Unfortunately, these tendencies are present within mainstream sustainability—the economy, which is only conceived of as the capitalist market system, is sacrosanct. It is simply taken as a given, removed from serious evaluation of how its actual logic and operations produce social inequalities and environmental degradation. We maintain that critical sustainability requires that we take nothing for granted, and are willing to engage in “a ruthless criticism of everything existing” (Marx 1978: 13). Critical sustainability includes careful attention to the various drivers of social inequality and environmental degradation, as these are linked through socioecological historical processes. Further, critical sustainability enters into multiple social and scientific debates regarding social and environmental justice. The interconnected exploitation of workers in general, women, and marginalized ethnic and racialized groups is part and parcel a historical system that has provided the stage for a theater of ecological tragedy. Historically, social inequalities have been reduced through redistribution programs, and forms of environmental degradation have been diminished through legislation, when the public mobilizes forcing political actions to constrain capital. Neoliberal capitalism threatens to undo even these modest accomplishments. What is dramatically clear is that serious consideration of sustainability, especially in regard to advancing social equity and maintaining the conditions of life, requires revolutionary transformations in the socioeconomic relationships that govern our productive lives. This means that new socioeconomic relations must be created, and they must be embedded within sociopolitical relations that direct them toward democratic ends, equality of opportunities, fulfillment of human needs, and the mending of ecological rifts in order to better maintain the conditions of life. Critical sustainability entails supplanting the very systems of expropriation and exploitation that produce and thrive on social inequalities. The purpose and meaning of work must be reorganized, directing it toward meeting human needs, enhancing the quality of life, eradicating injustices, creating substantive equality, and operating within the planetary boundaries. This is the work and promise of critical sustainability.

Racialized communities have borne the brunt of carbon capitalism from its origins in genocide and slavery to the contemporary climate crisis and are increasingly being displaced by the emerging green energy economy. Their location below the abyssal line subjects these communities to the “slow violence” of the extractive and polluting fossil fuel industry (Nixon 2013); resource wars; predatory economic policies; climate-induced disasters; and criminalization, detention, and state-sanctioned death when they attempt to cross the militarized borders of the global North. Viewing climate change as an environmental issue unrelated to other social justice struggles fosters environmental determinism, erases history, and conceals the multiple and inter-related injustices of carbon capitalism. Communities below the abyssal line are the canaries in the coal mine. They are the first to suffer the ravages of climate change, and their plight is a harbinger of the harm that will befall everyone. Racism creates divisions between groups of people whose vulnerability to carbon capitalism should serve as the basis for solidarity. As economic inequality increases and the planet’s ecosystems are brought to the brink of collapse, all but the very affluent will become frontline communities in an increasingly damaged and dangerous world. A concept of climate justice grounded in racial capitalism can bring together diverse social movements by articulating the links between extractivism, poverty, racism, economic inequality, environmental degradation, displacement, mass incarceration, police brutality, immigrant detention/deportation, militarism, indigenous dispossession, and a global economic order that systematically subordinates the global South and undermines the livelihoods of many in the global North. As Martin Luther King, Jr. noted decades ago, “[i]njustice anywhere is injustice everywhere (…). In a real sense all life is inter-related” (King 1963, n.p.). Only through collective struggle can genuinely emancipatory solutions be achieved. Racialization undermines solidarity by portraying large segments of humanity as inferior, unworthy, expendable and as threats to national security. Nowhere is this more evident than in the inhumane response of Northern countries to migrants fleeing conflict, persecution, poverty, and environmental degradation. As climate change increases the flow of migrants, Northern states are imposing solutions that reinforce national borders, intensify the abyssal divide, and absolve the North of responsibility for its prodigious carbon emissions and its current and historic subordination of the South. The scapegoating of migrants for the economic and ecological crises of capitalism impedes resilience and restricts mobility. This replicates historical patterns of confining colonized and enslaved peoples to particular locations while encouraging the mobility of colonizers. It is also eerily reminiscent of Garrett Hardin’s “lifeboat ethics” – the notion that the affluent should toss the (racialized) poor overboard in order to keep their own heads above water (Hardin 1974/2015). The climate crisis calls into question the sanctity of national borders and poses a fundamental challenge to the collapsing sovereign-centric Westphalian system. As current migration trends reveal, people will not sit still in the face of climate catastrophe. They will relocate, adapt, improvise, cross borders and find other ways of surviving and rebuilding their lives. Solutions premised on detaining and expelling climate-displaced persons have little chance of succeeding. The task ahead is to decolonize colonial notions of nationalism and fortified borders and to recognize the rights of climate-displaced persons to migrate collectively and individually. A legal framework based upon the largely unfettered right of states to exclude migrants is ill-suited to the achievement of climate justice

On redeeming whiteness at the United Nations and the allure of Green New Deals. For a long time, the writing had been on the wall for marginalized regions and countries whose disaster profiles and vulnerability have only become targets for asset managers like Black Rock and investors interested in making huge profits from climate disaster (e.g. , ). In light of this, the UNFCCC seemed to offer a rare forum, for these countries to voice and share their experiences, albeit one lacking in serious progress. At COP 26, countries left with only an undertaking to discuss loss and damage and a partial deal on ‘methane emissions’ with no binding and secure arrangement on fossil fuels (Jacobs, 2022). For some climate negotiators and scholars accustomed to the pace of multilateral climate governance, or who dance well to the tune of the status quo within these mainstream spaces, these inflection points may represent progress on longstanding issues. However, for global south communities being destructively reconstructed and refashioned after every hurricane season or flooding event, these piecemeal shifts offer limited hope of new avenues for life and possibility. As Patrick Bond, reflecting on the first global Climate Justice Forum and COP 26 suggests, the non-ambition of the Paris Agreement may have inured and insulated many in the very narrow framings, (non)reformist reforms, and politically problematic objectives that it offered (). He further argues that “no matter how much debate proceeds in injecting various justice framings into the UNFCCC, it will be impossible to generate an outcome of human endeavor, and planetary survival will be moot” (). This series of papers may help unlock new potential principles, analyses, strategies, tactics and alliances (called PASTA) that Bond and others have found necessary (). Apprehending the material effects of race as an ordering construct of capitalism permits new investigations into questions that affect global South communities and the equally dysselected in the global North (Wynter, 2003). Climate-related impacts not only reinforce imperial relationships (Bonilla, 2020, Sheller, 2020) and reproduce surplus populations (Perry, 2021a). They also offer empirical ground to reflect critically on the very material and epistemic terms by which new and reconfigured contours of humanism are being remapped (Baldwin, 2022) and have long been defined by proximity to European ideals. The approaches adopted in these papers emphasizes how racialist ideas and class politics underpin climate change measures, their global diffusion, ongoing extractive practices and the relationship between capital, land dispossession, and transformed relationship between nature and non-human beings (Bledsoe and Wright, 2019, Davis et al., 2019, Girvan, 1975, Girvan, 2014, , Penados et al., 2022, Rice et al., 2021, Simpson, 2017). Political responses at different scales, from climate activism to state-level actions to ongoing climate and economic crises that appear virtuous or well-meaning need to be analyzed and interrogated along these lines. Climate activist groups, especially those emerging in 2019 in Northern Europe, led by Greta Thunberg, have been predominantly white and extol longstanding views about nature and the environment and representing middle-class interests (Kalt, 2021, ). Their activism, often couched as “saving the environment” (see, IPPR Environmental Justice Commission, 2021), have ignored the history of Black and brown anti-racist environmental movements and the intersectional and anti-capitalist nature that these struggles took on, often emerging from the global South during the 1980s (Rehman, 2022). These new movements have often not paid attention to the relationship between colonialism, often perpetrated by their own states and corporations and ecological violence, and the primary role of capitalist social relations in ecological breakdown. In this vein, widespread attention has been paid to what is perhaps perceived as the most prominent of ‘progressive’ environmental crisis policy proposals by global North thinkers and institutions: ‘Green New Deals’ (hereafter GNDs) (Chowdhury 2022: Chomsky and Pollin, 2020, Commission, 2019, Ocasio-Cortez, 2019, Pollin, 2015, Táíwò, 2022, ). GNDs aim to decarbonize the economy and generate large-scale public investment in ‘green’ jobs and industries but they also tend to reinforce deep-rooted global stratifications in the process (, Paul, 2021, Perry, 2020, ). This is because they primarily advocate techno-fixes which would do little to nothing to address the root causes of climate breakdown (War on Want and London Mining Network, 2019). GND interventions also tend to obfuscate how environmental policies – including ‘net zero’ and carbon–neutral targets – treat Black and brown places as zones for imperial clearing and remediation to be performed by the very actors who have perpetrated these harms over decades and centuries (e.g. ). In other words, GNDs do little to address the ongoing legacies of racial capitalism. It is noteworthy that GNDs are not themselves uniform in their orientation, nor do they always propose homogeneous and modernist developmental reforms. For instance, Max Ajl’s ‘A People’s Green New Deal’ (2021) should have four integral elements: universal access to renewable energy, national political (and worker) sovereignty, climate reparations, decommodified public spaces, and food sovereignty based on agroecological techniques of production. Harpreet Paul similarly calls for innovative mechanisms that raise funding for those already marginalized “in a way that protects, respects and promotes human flourishing within our planetary boundaries” (, p. iii). She further suggests that reparative climate justice should be about fostering coalitions and cooperative action in workplaces, communities, schools and hospitals, and embodies a vision and movement that recognizes human-nature interdependences. Leon also believes that dismantling harmful ownership structures precipitating the climate crisis, and harnessing community power are important related steps in developing a truly internationalist approach. Nonetheless, GNDs appear to have fallen out of favor, even in their inadequate neo-imperialist form in which subordinate countries’ futures are tied to further and more violent resource extraction and their wishes for democratic and viable alternatives for life are undermined. At the same time, a ‘cost of living crisis’ has hit countries in the global North, connected both to the aftermath of Covid-19 inflation hikes linked to supply challenges and super-profiteering, and the surge in wholesale gas prices due to ongoing war in Ukraine. For countries with a significant debt burden, the crisis has exacerbated pre-existing hardships. Appreciation of the hegemonic currency, the US Dollar, means that countries are facing lower export volumes, increased debt service payments and borrowing costs linked to adjustments in interest rates in the US and Europe (Debt ). This means countries face sovereign default, such as recently experienced by Ghana, Sri Lanka, and Zambia. There is also the likelihood of more forceful intervention at the hands of their creditors or their agents. Yet these proposals have so far marginalized the experiences of climate devastation that are already being visited on racialized communities in the Global South. As indicated above, the geo-physical and socio-ecological relations that are spawned in the wake of climate breakdown perpetuate and exacerbate asymmetries that harken to longstanding colonialist relations between the global North and South. New solutions are underpinned by processes of racialization and racialized subjectivities germane to the colonial and modernizing development project. New formations and practices that are anticipated under a ‘global’ GND put forward by the United Nations do not contest existing spatial asymmetries of technologies, power, capital, and resources (Gallagher and Kozul-Wright, 2019, ). Instead, proposals often claim to offer a new ideas and approaches based on reformed multilateralism, by which all boats rise to new green horizons. These imaginaries further discount and ignore the global racial hierarchy that was set in motion due to colonial political and economic relations and their new mutations created in the postwar era. While GNDs appear to have sound principles, the manner in which the most prominent discussions and practices have emerged around them, whether in ‘progressive’ or social democratic circles is a universal imposition in which global class struggle is downplayed. In addition to oppressed voices, positions and aspirations of global South people and communities are silenced and deemed an afterthought. It is purported as a redeeming effort with all of its paternalism, that (white) elites and middle classes know better and that global South peoples need salvation from the worst effects of the problems created by extractivist and high-carbon consuming elites and corporations in the global North. While the work of creating new structures for labor and community-controlled workplaces appear essential and progressive, as GND proponents proffer (), these working arrangements are nestled in already exploitative global commodity chains. The task of dismantling labor arrangements arising from capitalist social relations and spatial dependencies with global North corporations and institutions remains to be seen. In the post-Trump period, the United States presents itself as a shining light in climate Armageddon, having just secured a climate deal in Congress, awkwardly called ‘The Inflation Reduction Act’. The Act proposes to spend $370 billion on climate issues, yet it permits more fossil fuel exploration and licensing (Davenport and Friedman, 2022). Europe also presents itself as a hopeful beacon of ‘carbon neutrality’ with its intention to reduce its supposed dependence on fossil fuels (from its former colonies) (European Commission, 2018), which the Russian invasion of Ukraine has only further complicated. The climate crisis and its uneven unfolding offers spaces for redemptive acts of nominal inclusion and violent exclusion through green capitalist utopias. The erasure, displacement and uneven mobility of people and places accompanying such moves serve to ground new acts of purification, rebirth and redemption (see Shilliam, 2012, Wynter, 1995). There is a possibility that ultimate “inclusion” on the COP 27 agenda and “recognition” – which were long being vehemently denied – through statements from global North powers about loss and damage leading up to the latest climate summit can be seen as a form of (violent) imposition (Jackson, 2020) through acts of misremembering historical erasure, misattributing responsibility, instrumentalizing indigenous ways of knowing, misrecognizing those with the most to lose, and even tokenistic accommodation. These redemptive acts are paralleled by ‘reformist’ and sometimes punitive policies that offer little else than structural adjustment reforms, debt packages and so-called innovative financial instruments (, Perry, 2022). Further, in this redemptive thrust, the European Union and United States have weaponized political and economic power within global climate policy and financial institutions to impose so-called carbon border adjustment taxes that sanction carbon-intensive exports from the global South (Friedman, 2021, Unctad, 2021), whose societies have long served as the extractive zones or resource reservoirs for global North corporations, states and investors. The monumental achievement of green technologies and the green futures they are meant to realise, is to allow global North corporations to promote, patent, and dominate this apparent form of redemption (). The public investment push of GNDs adds credence to the rational redemption of the state as a basis for socio-ecological transformation () – what we argue is a new crisis configuration that rearticulates degrees of humanness – in part supported by climate science reports, climate financial architecture, and the mainstream of global climate governance. The current changes in monetary and fiscal policy that increase parasitic debt relations is another example in which the exploitation of global South workers is made worse and entrench inequalities. Understanding and problematizing these entanglements and linkages between connected yet distinct geographies in terms of labor surplus value extraction, commodification, and land overexploitation would help unlock and demonstrate which human institutions need dismantling at different scales. An analytic that promotes internationalism and appreciates labor exploitation as heterogeneous, uneven and interconnected processes enables a broader consideration of alternatives and highlight the ongoing struggle and legacy of global South movements. It should also eschew universal global policy fixes that can be applied regardless of historical or political context and needs, and ideally should eliminate the straightjacket with which governments and people in the South must currently contend in pursuing their own goals and ideas towards self-determination and ecological and social justice by other means.

Racial Capitalism and Climate Change: An analysis of climate change through the lens of racial capitalism and coloniality reveals additional aspects of climate injustice that are obscured by the four-part definition articulated in this article (distributive, procedural, corrective, and social). In order to appreciate the full extent of climate injustice, it is important to examine the ways that race is inscribed in the history of carbon capitalism and the sacrifice zones of both the fossil fuel economy and the emerging green energy economy. First, the colonization of the Americas and the transatlantic slave trade established the material and ideological foundations of capitalism – a system based on extraction, accumulation through dispossession, and white supremacy (Davis and Todd 2017, Yusoff 2018). The Anthropocene is the epoch under which ‘humanity’ – but more accurately, petrochemical companies and those invested in and profiting from petrocapitalism and colonialism – have had such a large impact on the planet that radionuclides, coal, plutonium, plastic, concrete, genocide and other markers are now visible in the geologic strata. (Davis and Todd 2017, p. 765; emphasis added) The genocide of the indigenous populations of the Americas in the 1500s was so massive (nearly 50 million deaths) that farming collapsed and forests rebounded. The forests removed such large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere as to cause a significant dip in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in the 1600s, measurable in Antarctic ice cores – leading Lewis and Maslin (2015, pp. 175-177) to propose 1610 as the beginning of the Anthropocene. This early marker of the Anthropocene coincided with the importation of slave labour to extract gold, silver and copper and later the sugar and cotton that fueled the Industrial Revolution (Yusoff 2018, pp. 29-33). Starting the Anthropocene at 1610 captures all impacts of the Industrial Revolution, which many scientists and historians consider a key part of the Anthropocene – because European annexing of the Americas was an essential factor in providing food energy and raw material imports that were critical elements allowing an Industrial Revolution to take place. (Lewis and Maslin 2018, p. 319) Colonization and slavery were therefore central rather than peripheral to the Industrial Revolution and the birth of carbon capitalism (Williams 1994, Beckert 2014, Blackburn 1997, Yusoff 2018). Second, the “slow violence” inflicted by the fossil fuel industry on racialized and poor communities throughout the world remains a central feature of contemporary capitalism (Nixon 2013, Soyapi and Kotzé 2016). The extraction, processing, transportation, refining and combustion of fossil fuels has placed disproportionate environmental burdens on racialized communities in the global North and South. From the Niger Delta to the Canadian tar sands and the countless communities living in the shadow of polluting petrochemical facilities and power plants, the life cycle impacts of fossil fuels include eviction from ancestral lands; desecration of sacred sites; poisoning of air, land, and water; fires, explosions, and industrial accidents; loss of subsistence fishing and hunting rights; and exposure to significant health hazards (Klein 2014). Local and transnational environmental justice struggles against coal mining, petroleum drilling, fracking, oil and gas pipelines, and polluting refineries and power plants are thus inextricably intertwined with the struggle for climate justice. Third, fossil fuels are concentrated in particular countries and regions such as the Middle East that have been targeted over and over for invasion, occupation, and exploitation. The North’s bloody resource wars, its collusion with despotic petro-states, and the resulting death, destruction and displacement of racialized Muslim and Arab populations are amongst the most violent ongoing manifestations of climate injustice (Klare 2004, Natarajan 2012, Klein 2016). When persons displaced by these conflicts seek refuge in the global North, they are branded as potential terrorists and subjected to restrictive border controls, including the notorious “Muslim ban” on travel to the US from certain predominantly Muslim countries (Liptak and Shear 2018, Telford 2018). Fourth, those most susceptible to climate-related disasters and slow-onset events are overwhelmingly persons classified as non-white (Haas Institute 2017, Pulido 2018). They reside in locations such as low-lying coastal zones, small island states, and agriculturedependent nations disproportionately exposed to hurricanes, floods, drought, desertification and rising sea levels (Anand 2004). In addition, they have been rendered socially and economically vulnerable to climate change by the North’s economic and military interventions. The North’s “under-development” of the global South during the colonial and postcolonial era, so eloquently described by Walter Rodney (1972) and Eduardo Galeano (1997), has been exacerbated by decades of neoliberal economic reforms imposed initially by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and subsequently through regional and multilateral trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties (Gonzalez 2015). These reforms increased poverty; reduced access to health care, education, and other social services; undermined the development of climate-resilient urban and rural infrastructure; created mass displacement; and deprived states and communities of resources for climate adaptation and disaster response and recovery (Haas Institute 2017, Saad 2017). Finally, racialized communities in the global South are being displaced not only by climate change, military interventions and neoliberal economic policies, but also by the measures deployed to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. For example, wind farms are being developed in Oaxaca, Mexico on indigenous lands to provide energy to Walmart, Coca-Cola, Heineken and Cemex (a Mexican cement manufacturer) without public debate; adequate compensation; free, prior and informed consent; equitable sharing of benefits with local communities; and mechanisms to provide compensation for damage and loss to land (Baker 2015, Zárate-Toledo et al. 2019). In Canada, a controversial proposal to build an enormous hydroelectric dam on the Peace River threatens to displace indigenous peoples and replicate the sacrifice zones of carbon capitalism – this time in the name of “green energy” (Scott and Smith 2017). In Brazil and throughout the global South, forest conservation schemes developed through the climate regime’s Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) mechanism undermine the rights of local and indigenous communities to harvest plants, timber, or fish in their ancestral territories (Klein 2014, Kronk Warner 2015). Lastly, legislation in the US and the EU mandating the blending of biofuels into transportation fuels has increased food prices and incentivized large-scale land transactions in the global South that destroy forests and displace rural dwellers in order to make way for large plantations to cultivate biofuel feedstocks (such as oil palm). These mandates remain in place even though the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions of many biofuels exceed those of the fossil fuels they replace (Gonzalez 2016). An analysis of climate change grounded in the coloniality of power reveals a key thread that unites these abuses – the abyssal line dividing those deemed human from those deemed non-human or sub-human. While everyone is vulnerable to climate change, those who occupy the sacrifice zones of racial capitalism are particularly susceptible to harm due to their classification as sub-human and disposable. Racialization justifies and naturalizes violence and dispossession in war zones, in resource extraction zones, in the green energy economy, and in the refugee camps and migrant detention centers of the global North. As Naomi Klein candidly observes: A culture that places so little value on black and brown lives that it is willing to let human beings disappear beneath the waves, or set themselves on fire in detention centres, will also be willing to let the countries where black and brown people live disappear beneath the waves, or desiccate in the arid heat. When that happens, theories of human hierarchy – that we must take care of our own first – will be marshalled to rationalize these monstrous decisions. (Klein 2016, p. 9) Even though they have uprooted “the darker races” (Du Bois 1900/2007) throughout the world through the ecological and economic crises of colonialism, militarism and predatory capitalism, Northern governments use a variety of border controls to exclude “those whose very recourse to migration results from the ravages of capital and military occupations” (Walia 2013, p. 5). For those below the abyssal line, racism is not simply prejudice or discrimination, but “state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (Gilmore 2007, p. 28). International law has been deeply complicit in the project of racial capitalism. As Antony Anghie (2004) explains, international law originates in the colonial encounter and has been used to justify successive Northern interventions in the global South through a variety of doctrines – including terra nullius, the doctrine of discovery, the mandate system, trusteeship, modernization, development, good governance, humanitarian intervention and pre-emptive self-defense. International law has depicted Southern peoples as so primitive, savage, uncivilized, backward, and under-developed that their lives, livelihoods, and cultures are unworthy of protection (Anghie 2004, Gonzalez 2015). This history raises serious questions about the ability of the climate regime to secure climate justice for racialized communities displaced by climate change.

WHAT DOES EXTINCTIOPOLITICS DO? In the previous section, I refrained from critically analysing extinctiopolitics. However, even from a cursory overview of the field of existential risk studies, serious limitations are apparent. Building on the critical accounts of the field published in recent years, several key points should be highlighted. Normatively speaking, the total utilitarianism advanced by Bostrom and Ord appears to prioritise the survival of the human species over the wellbeing of actually existing people (The Dangerous Ideas; Democratising Risk). Karin Kuhlemann, adapting Parfit's example above, instructively contrasts two possible scenarios: one in which 'a global catastrophe causes ninety-nine per cent of the human population to slowly starve to death' and the second in which 'the human lineage gently dwindles into extinction without any suffering (e.g. because individuals lose interest in procreation)'. (33) On the logic of existential risk studies, the former scenario is preferable because, despite causing a huge amount of suffering to living people, it safeguards the future of the species. The utilitarian logic of extinctiopolitics sidelines the suffering of actual people and, worse, could be used to justify inflicting suffering in the name of protecting the future of humanity (Calamity Theory, p24, p52). (34) If it is the case that space colonisation is one of the best strategies for protecting the future of the species, any exploitation and oppression associated with initiatives like Musk's SpaceX are legitimate; they are a small price to be paid for reducing existential risk. The empirical account of the threats facing humanity can also be questioned. In particular, as discussed further below, since there is only a small possibility that climate change will totally eliminate humanity, it is deprioritised by philosophers associated with existential risk (see The Dangerous Ideas). Furthermore, while there is a particular focus on the risks posed by technology, such as nuclear weapons, synthetic biology and artificial intelligence, there is very little attention to the social and political structures that shape these technologies and how they are used. (35) Systematic discussions of capitalism, colonialism, racism, patriarchy and so on are entirely absent in the writings of Bostrom and Ord. Moreover, the field obscures the differential effects of catastrophes; the combined and uneven consequences of extinction across space and time are flattened. For instance, there is no acknowledgement that, for many Indigenous peoples, the end of the world is not something for the future but, instead, an event that has already happened (I return to this point in the final section). Finally, it is unclear whether the solutions posited by existential risk studies are adequate. Bostrom and Ord, against Gunther Anders' pessimistic claim in the face of nuclear disaster that 'the possibility of our self-extinction cannot end--except through the end itself', assert that humanity will eventually escape the age of existential risk. (36) In the utopian world imagined, preventing extinction is no longer a priority; existential risk will have been conquered. However, as others stress, the utopian ambitions of the field may increase rather than reduce existential risk. (37) For example, the advanced technologies required for space colonisation could be easily refunctioned for destructive ends and trigger what Daniel Deudney calls an 'astrocide', or 'the extinction of humanity caused directly or indirectly by largescale human space expansion' (Dark Skies, p362). Moreover, just as the social causes of catastrophe are obscured, the social relations of the future utopia are vaguely described; it appears that the future world of liberation will leave the structures of the present untouched. Indeed, the positive content of the transhumanist utopia imagined by Bostrom reflects and reinforces social inequalities. As Claire Colebrook notes, the lionisation of cognitive activity as the sine qua non of the future world is 'bound up with the "man" of Western reason', a figure that is strongly associated with many forms of oppression and violence (especially in relation to race, disability, gender and sexuality) (Lives Worth Living, p167). In the light of the dubious normative consequences, skewed empirical account of the threats to humanity and flawed vision of the liberated future, it is difficult to affirm extinctiopolitics. However, these criticisms do not examine why extinctiopolitics has emerged in the current conjuncture. What is the relationship between, on the one hand, thinking the future in terms of threats to human extinction and, on the other, the social struggles, political crises and cultural anxieties of the last two decades? What is it about existential risk studies that resonates with philosophers at prestigious universities and billionaires in the tech industry? As David Sepkoski argues more generally, there is a close association between, on the one hand, discourses of extinction and, on the other, the social and political context in which they are elaborated. (38) For instance, the theory that the dinosaurs were annihilated by an asteroid that triggered huge climatic changes, which was first proposed in the 1980s, can be understood in terms of broader Cold War anxieties about the threat of a nuclear winter. The past end of the dinosaurs and the future end of humanity were bound together by widespread fascination with 'sudden, cataclysmic events capable of obliterating life in the flash of an atomic blast or an asteroid impact' (Catastrophic Thinking, p298). Given this, are there similar resonances at play in the popularity of existential risk studies in the contemporary moment? It should first be stressed that this is a subversive question to pose to extinctiopolitics. For existential risk studies, we need to abstract ourselves from the immediate concerns of the contemporary moment. The object of extinctiopolitics is the long-term trajectory of humanity; it traces the entire history of the species from its origins to its multiplanetary and transhumanist future. From this perspective, the political and social concerns of the present moment, especially those that are deemed non-existential in their stakes, are insignificant. For instance, Leigh encourages us to place ourselves in the grand arc of human history: 'Suppose humanity's potential time on the planet was shrunk down to a single eighty-year life span. In that event, we would now be a newborn baby--just nine days old' (What's the Worst, p10). Indeed, scholars associated with existential risk studies voice frustration with politicians for their short-term perspective; they respond to today's headlines rather than the long-term interests of the species. Ord recounts that: 'When I have raised the topic of existential risk with senior politicians and civil servants, I have encountered a common reaction: genuine deep concern paired with a feeling that addressing the greatest risks facing humanity was "above my pay grade"' (The Precipice, p35). Similarly, William MacAskill, another proponent of existential risk studies, recalls the response when he talked about future pandemics at a meeting with Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, in 2017: 'Everyone laughed, and the host of the dinner, Sir Tom Hunter, joked that I was "freaking everyone oot"'. (39) However, the disavowals of presentism amongst the proponents of existential risk studies should not be taken at face value. There are resonances between extinctiopolitics and the conjuncture in which it emerged; it is entangled with a set of concerns that are specific to the moment of the 2000s and 2010s. Extinctiopolitics chimes with the broader feeling of crisis and catastrophe that has emerged since the turn of the millennium. It is perhaps no accident that 2002 witnessed the publication of Bostrom's foundational paper on existential risk and the establishment of Musk's aerospace company SpaceX. The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, as Phillip E. Wegner notes, marked the decisive end of the long 1990s in the American context. (40) Like the extinction risks highlighted by Bostrom, the event of 9/11 inaugurated a new understanding of the future in which it is defined not by endless peace and prosperity but instead decisive caesuras and disastrous failures. Furthermore, the catastrophic consciousness fostered by existential risk studies has found succour in a range of events in the decades that have followed 9/11, including the global financial crisis of 2007/08, the rise of authoritarian populist governments across Europe and North America in the 2010s, the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. However, extinctiopolitics has a particular affinity with the apocalyptic mood that surrounds the current climate crisis, something captured by Greta Thunberg's declaration that the world is on fire and Extinction Rebellion's claim that we are living in a climate emergency. (41) The 'Anthropocene is the Apocalypse', its arrival marking the end of the relative stability of the Holocene era and a beginning of a new world of radical ruptures and unprecedented events. (42) In this context, images of human extinction become convincing. In the face of the revenge of Gaia, what hope is there for humanity? The power of extinctiopolitics partly derives from its elaboration of the catastrophic consciousness of the current conjuncture; it takes up anxieties about destruction and brings them to their conclusion with the vision of an Earth absent of humanity. Here, it is instructive to contrast existential risk studies to the new optimists, a group of writers including Steven Pinker, Hans Rosling and Johan Norberg, who claim that history is a story of unending progress. (43) By virtue of the free market and Enlightenment philosophy, people are richer and healthier than at any other point in history. Moreover, the new optimists see no reason why this should not continue into the future; however severe the problem, capitalism will find a solution. It is easy to see why this idea might appeal to those committed to the current social order and, like existential risk studies, it has been promoted by billionaires such as Bill Gates. (44) However, given the crises of the contemporary moment, it is unsurprising that even billionaires have found the sunny optimism of Pinker, Rosling and Norberg insufficient; something more is required than the declaration that everything will work out for the best in the end. In contrast to existential risk studies, which foregrounds the dangers and threats to the human species, the declaration that the twenty-first century will bring unending progress rings hollow, masking over rather than responding to the catastrophic consciousness inaugurated by the financial crisis, the pandemic and climate change. Scholars associated with existential risk studies both affirm and critique the new optimist account of history. For extinctiopolitics, the future will be better than the past; if the species succeeds in not extinguishing itself, then it is almost inevitable that utopia will be established. Ord, explicitly invoking the new optimists, states that 'at the largest scales of human history ... the trends toward progress are clear' (The Precipice, p18). At the same time, extinctiopolitics cannot entirely accept the image of the future painted by the new optimists, with Emile P Torres making it clear that it offers, at best, a partial account: '... this cluster of encouraging trends is only half of the diachronic picture of humanity, so to speak. The human condition is indeed better overall today than in the past, but the contemporary world also contains far more risk potential than any previous moment in anthropological history' (Facing Disaster, p6, emphasis in original). (45) Extinctiopolitics, in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's terms, posits a dialectic of enlightenment; the forces that appear to guarantee the advancement of humanity react back on themselves to deliver intensified forms of destruction. (46) A phenomenon like climate change is thus, in principle, entirely explicable on the logic of existential risk. The huge increase in carbon emissions over the past few centuries is simultaneously a symptom of human control over nature and produces uncontrollable forces that threaten the current social order. Yet, extinctiopolitics, despite evoking the catastrophic tendencies of the contemporary moment with its talk of annihilation, does not directly address them. The speculative account of future human annihilation is an analogy for the problems of the present. Existential risk is marked by the social and ecological tensions of capitalist society but it does not offer a determinate conceptual account of them. This is especially evident in the place of climate change in discourses of existential risk. On the one hand, the ecocidal movement of contemporary capitalism is too big to entirely ignore, with accounts of existential risk habitually devoting some attention to environmental issues (see Existential Risk, p9; The Precipice, pp53-58; What's the Worst, pp36-54; What We Owe, pp134-140). On the other hand, as Torres stresses in their critical account, climate change is consistently devalued as an existential risk (The Dangerous Ideas). For instance, Ord suggests that global warming is an 'immense human tragedy' but, given that it is unlikely to cause the annihilation of the species (even on the gloomiest predictions), it does not 'pose a direct existential risk to humanity' (The Precipice, p56). MacAskill concurs with this assessment, noting that 'climate change does not drastically increase the risk of civilisational collapse' (What We Owe, p136). Like the nuclear war that kills ninety-nine per cent of the population, a recovery from climate change, even if it takes thousands of years, is possible. Tallinn, one of the billionaire funders of the field, makes a similar argument: 'Climate change is not going to be an existential risk unless there's a runaway scenario'. (47) In fact, Tallinn, channelling Donald Rumsfeld, states that a more important risk is 'unknown unknowns', or 'things that we can't perhaps think about right now' (quoted in 3 Existential Risks). On the typological approach of extinctiopolitics, climate change is relegated to a second-order risk; it is like, but not quite, an existential challenge. To borrow a notion from Sigmund Freud, extinctiopolitics cultivates a form of screen memory. This concept refers to a phenomenon whereby 'the mnemic image which would have been justified by the original event' is 'associatively displaced' by another image, the latter repressing and masking the former. (48) The substitution of one image by another has a mollifying function, protecting the subject from the full force of a destructive event. The presence of certain images of catastrophe can exclude and displace other threatening and troublesome processes. For instance, Michelle Bratu Hansen, reflecting on the place of the Holocaust in American society, suggests that the genocide of the Jews 'could be read as a kind of screen allegory behind/through which the nation is struggling to find a proper mode of memorialising traumata closer to home', whether this be the enslavement of African Americans, the genocide of Indigenous peoples or recent imperialist wars. (49) Similar processes are at work in extinctiopolitics. Unlike the new optimists, who largely dismiss the dangers of the present, the anxiety associated with ecocide is acknowledged through the analogy of human extinction; the latter summons a sense of the unfolding catastrophes of the present. However, extinctiopolitics, which focuses on the history of the species across hundreds of thousands of years, soothes the angst associated with contemporary threats by displacing them into the long-term history of humanity. The traumatic feelings associated with climate change are immanent in the understanding of existential risk but, at the same time, they are camouflaged by reference to speculative disasters in the future. (50) Extinctiopolitics, in Fredric Jameson's terms, involves 'transformational work on social and political anxieties and fantasies', such that they are 'subsequently "managed" or repressed'. (51) Tallinn's unknown unknowns, a destructive event of immense scale that cannot yet be described, contains the ecological catastrophe but also deflects the gaze away from it. Existential risk studies is defined by a tension. On the one hand, with Walter Benjamin, it acknowledges that there is something destructive at the heart of the contemporary world: 'The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are "status quo" is the catastrophe'. (52) On the other hand, extinctiopolitics obscures the stakes of this unfolding catastrophe; it depoliticises disaster, pacifying the anxieties produced by financial, political and climatic crises. (53) The tension at the heart of existential risk studies is symptomatic of a real contradiction for billionaires in capitalist society: between the desire for the continuation of the capitalist mode of production and an awareness of its destructive consequences for nature (both human and non-human). Extinctiopolitics is a means by which to respond to the disruptions and dangers associated with the spread of capitalism across the globe but in such a way that the social and political relations of the current moment are untouched and unquestioned. Extinctiopolitics, to quote Jameson again, invents 'imaginary or formal "solutions" to unresolvable social contradictions'. (54) The desire to escape from the bounds of the Earth is one such solution; it stages and resolves a genuine tension. To return to Adorno and Horkheimer's terms, it suggests that it is possible to accelerate away from the dialectic of enlightenment, leaving behind the contradictions of the present social order through new technological developments. The dream of a multi-planetary humanity is thus a technofix; it stimulates a feeling for the tragic arc of history and renders invisible the social forces underlying the movement toward catastrophe. Utopian accounts of a spacefaring humanity are a masquerade, mimicking the shape of a radical response to a serious crisis while being devoid of the social and political content required to address it. A possible concern can be raised here. Reading existential risk studies in terms of the Freudian notion of the screen image might imply that the dangers highlighted can be dismissed as mere fantasies. However, recent events suggest the value of the warnings advanced by Bostrom and Ord. For instance, MacAskill's What We Owe the Future (2022), another addition to the growing corpus of texts concerned with existential risk, states: 'Russia's invasion of Ukraine reminds us that war can all too quickly return to regions that have enjoyed peace for decades, and that initially more limited disputes can push the world's largest nuclear powers dangerously close to the brink of a direct confrontation' (What We Owe, p113). If, prior to the war in Ukraine, nuclear conflict seemed like a distant possibility, it is now a much more pressing concern. However, even if existential risk studies is right to identify nuclear conflict as a major danger to humanity, this does not change the underlying logic of the field. Nuclear war remains subject to the high bar of human extinction. As long as the current conflict does not annihilate humanity as a whole, it is a second-order risk. Extinctiopolitics, in a familiar pattern, evokes the disastrous consequences of the war for the people of Ukraine and its deleterious effects elsewhere, especially in terms of fuel and food prices, while also masking over these tensions by focusing on human extinction and placing the war in the long arc of human history. The conflict is thus abstracted from social and political context, with questions of inter-imperial rivalry, shifts in the global economy and revivification of nationalist forces side-lined in favour of a focus on the capacities of atomic technology itself.

But, again, it is which lives are subordinated to fiscal solvency that is key. Michigan cities placed under EFMs are disproportionately African American (Table 1). Abbey-Lambertz () has pointed out that African Americans constitute only 14% of Michigan’s population, yet they are approximately 49% of those living under EFM. This is a shocking statistic: Half of Michigan’s African Americans are not living under any pretense of local democracy. As one Flint resident sarcastically wrote, “State Take Over Coming to a Black City Near You” (Williams ). Nor has the over-representation of Black places under EFM escaped the notice of the mainstream media. “Coming in the wake of deindustrialization, recession, and persistent poverty, state intervention has disproportionately impacted the people who – because of race and class – have been given the least opportunity to succeed in America” (Lewis ). Having established the vulnerability of Black places, let us return to surplus populations and devaluation. As explained earlier, key to the devaluation of Black Flint is its status as a surplus population. But calling Black residents “surplus” does not adequately convey their relationship to capital. We need to more fully theorize the role of surplus in contemporary capitalism. Generally, surplus populations embody varying degrees of integration into the workforce, ranging from precarious employment to the permanently unemployed. Many have argued that the most peripheral surplus populations have zero value to capital. “Once relegated as permanent surplus … these populations are little more than human waste, excreted from the capitalist system” (Yates , 1680). While this is often true, Gilmore () has demonstrated capital’s ability to transform surplus populations into profit through the prison industrial complex. Though Flint inhabitants are potential prisoners, they are still city residents, and thus we need to more fully understand their relationship to capital. Collard and Dempsey () have developed a typology that describes how various forms of nature are valued by capital. Though their schema centers on nonhuman nature, it is helpful in understanding Flint. Utilizing their framework, Flint’s Black residents can be seen as embodying at least three distinct forms of surplus: “Outcast Surplus,” “The Underground,” and “Threat.” Outcast Surplus refers to the widely held idea that surplus is of no value to capital. This position has been implicit throughout this essay and will not be elaborated on. However, I believe that Flint’s relationship to capital is more complex than Outcast Surplus suggests. “The Underground” refers to both human and nonhuman nature that perform services for capital but which are not recognized or valued. Examples include unpaid domestic work or ecosystem services (Collard and Dempsey, ). I argue that Flint is performing unpaid labor for capital by preparing the larger society for increased struggles over basic reproduction, including such necessities as water. It is inconceivable that a wealthy or even a middle-class neighborhood in the US (of any color) would deliberately be given poisoned water. Yet, it is entirely conceivable that such a thing could happen in a poor, nonwhite place. Places like Flint are where crisis is being “worked out” and the newest tools and practices of neoliberalism are being fashioned. Flint is a training ground for “disciplining” places by finance capital. What is happening in Flint today, the rest of us can expect in the coming years: the continued devaluation of life and the sacredness of bonds. Of course, this is not new. This is what happened in the Global South in the 1980s through austerity, debt, and structural readjustment (George ). One Flint resident actually said that the community felt like a “Third World Country” (ACLU of Michigan ). Did she know how accurate this was? Flint’s water disaster signals the inability to provide a hallmark of the “first world” to its surplus residents: clean, tap water. As President Obama stated, I will not rest … until every drop of water that flows to your homes is safe to drink, and safe to cook with, and safe to bathe in, because that’s part of the basic responsibility of a government in the United States of America. (Pearce , A8, emphasis added) It is difficult to overemphasize the significance of potable water to the US’s sense of self. While I was growing up, the jokes about Mexico’s drinking water were legendary, “Don’t drink the water!” Water was both a symbolic and material manifestation of Mexican economic, political, and social inferiority. Mexico, as a “third world” country, was incapable of providing safe tap water, while in the US, this was taken for granted (Salzman ). Though there have been moments when potable water was temporarily unavailable in the US, increasingly poor Black, Brown, and indigenous communities are unable to consistently access sufficient, clean water (Jennings ; Marcum ). This is a singular moment in US history as we confront our downward mobility. The final relationship that Flint has to capital is as “Threat.” Marx largely dismissed the revolutionary potential of surplus populations, arguing that they lacked the proper consciousness and discipline. While it is true that surplus populations may have different forms of consciousness than workers, many theorists have overlooked the revolutionary potential of nonwhite populations, in particular, how materialist demands have been incorporated into antiracist struggle. Too often these are seen as “racial” issues, devoid of economic content. This is a misreading, particularly of Black history, which is filled with poor Black people fighting for both economic and racial justice (Georgakas and Surkin ; Kelley ; Quizar ; Woods ). Robinson has dubbed this powerful revolutionary consciousness and history the Black Radical Tradition (BRT). It is “an accretion, over generations, of collective intelligence gathered from struggle … in its most militant manifestation … the purpose of the struggles informed by the tradition became the overthrow of the whole race-based structure” (, xxx–xxxi). This does not mean that all Black people are poised for revolution. But it does acknowledge that a powerful tradition exists among the Black diaspora that can be drawn upon. The class struggles of white workers have only rarely included the fight against racial capitalism. Not only have most whites been partially pacified by their privileged status, but the “wages of whiteness” (Roediger ) have enabled capital to extract greater levels of surplus than would otherwise be possible. In contrast, Black people have been forced to struggle against racism, class exploitation, and gendered oppression for centuries – often directly against the white working class. Evidence of the BRT can be seen in its role in ending slavery as well as current efforts to dismantle the prison industrial complex.

Following the insights Cedric Robinson, Patricia Williams, Saidiya Hartman, Lisa Lowe, Colin Dayan, and others, we note that today we are undergoing another seismic transformation of liberal rights to coordinate and arrange emergent hegemonies of accumulation. Often referred to as “neoliberalism,” today’s racial capitalism is creating what we term a differential rights order, transforming “rights” into an anchor for administrative actions, from the local to the supranational, that facilitates the required (de)valorization today’s financialized and extractive racial capitalism. Important scholarship has made us familiar with the ways in which differential rights schemas have been used to organize capitalism in racial modernity: the bestowing of liberal rights to white, property-holding European men and the assignment of degrees of gendered and racialized rightlessness to all others, an asymmetry that structured colonial, plantation, and early industrial modes of capital accumulation globally. From others, we have learned that the revolutionary upheavals of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, in which enslaved, colonized, and Indigenous people fought for freedom—struggles conventionally narrated as “winning rights”—did not end the rights-based operationalization of racial capitalism. Rather, differential rights schemas continued to coordinate racial capitalist economies, enabling racial capitalist exploitation and settler colonial dispossession through the extension of rights.2 Operating through ostensibly democratic processes, today’s rights-regimes expand differential rights by prioritizing expansive rule-making capacities and rule-enforcement, seeking to bend social formations to the changing interests of capital. Unlike previous eras of racial capitalism, the neoliberal era governs through administrative apparatuses that presume rights-bearing as an abstract universal, all the while using rights as a material force that generates both the systemic and haphazard violences necessary for contemporary practices of accumulation. Since the passing of the Civil Rights Acts and the success of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, the basic dynamic of racial capitalism has been the Republican mobilization of white constituencies to block democracy in favor of elite capitalist interests (combining antitax, probusiness rights with white supremacist identity politics) and the political economic management of negatively racialized urban populations through intertwined regimes of asset-stripping, public aid, and law and order. This dynamic has been tempered by neoliberal multiculturalism and the emergence of a multiracial professional managerial class.3 Yet, with the passage of Citizens United, the dynamic has transcended to a level marked by opportunistic racial capitalist assemblages of business, investment, and governance that can articulate rules as mundane as municipal zoning regulations and as lofty as global economic alliances.

Liberalism: always too late, or capitalism’s colonial and enslaving proactivity? In the IPCC reports, time as a linear human orientation is placed in the context of timescales of forces requiring human intervention but out of human control: climate change. The recent SRl.5 (IPCC, Citation2018), ‘Global Warming of 1.5°C’, representing the ‘newer instalment of the scientisation of climate change’, situates ‘the issue beyond democratic debate by declaring it a matter for the scientific expertise of the IPCC’, and inscribes it as an emergency (Garrard, Citation2020, p. 1). The report suggests ‘climate change is moving faster than we are’ (Masson-Delmotte et al., Citation2018, p. v), and its urgency demands our intervention. However, the moral and ethical articulation of the climate as a linear temporal ‘urgency’ does not allow us to understand ecological shifts or even climate change in a larger trajectory, including human conquest, property relations, and competition. Rather, the report’s ‘foreshortened timeframe’ speaks to the urgent need of global concerted efforts to mitigate climate change and signals how temporary responses and procrastination are not going to do the trick (Garrard, Citation2020, p. 2). John Mecklin, Editor of Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, similarly reminds us that time is running out: Faced with this daunting threat landscape and a new willingness of political leaders to reject the negotiations and institutions that can protect civilization over the long term, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board today moves the Doomsday Clock 20 s closer to midnight - closer to apocalypse than ever. (Mecklin, Citation2020) The moving of the clock makes the ‘climate emergency’ public, especially for those proponents of liberalism whose ‘macroscopic exclusion clauses’ have been written to ‘displace … unfreedom’ onto all marginalized, enslaved, and colonized peoples and those ‘primitive’ and ‘undeveloped’ sites ‘from a white male bourgeois European who was the historical agent in the narrative’ (Mann, Citation2019). Yet this moving of the clock does not address the root of the problem. It allows the positing of a secular/humanist eschatological story (Rothe, Citation2020, p. 162) whose temporal structure is one of immanent destruction, informed by an analysis of existence as being-towards-death (i.e. of the human and the planet) or catastrophe. Of course, this schematic presumes death and ecological catastrophe (collapsed into one). It represents a never-reached horizon of experience, where authentic and moral decisions must be made through a theory or ‘concept of crisis or emergency’ (Mann, Citation2019). Liberal leaders of the international political system ‘inch toward’ an implementation of a regulatory system, what Mann and Wainwright call climate Leviathan, instead of addressing the root causes of global warming. These leaders are not creative but ‘fumble … for solutions’, continuing to argue that ‘climate change’ is a ‘market failure, without considering the limiting structures of the ‘market’ itself (Osaka, Citation2019, p. 2; citing Mann & Wainwright, Citation2018). When the moment for organized challenge emerges, white hegemony rushes to squander the creative energy and reorients social relations toward its consolidation. It does so by rushing to innovate through the co-production of narratives and an emerging ecological order. The present as a fracture of notions of history and ‘historical natures’ Apocalypse is ‘the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal’ (Buell, Citation1995, p. 285). As such, it deranges capital and its entanglements with ecological problems, ranging from the climate change, to the extinction of species, the loss of pollinating insects, and other ecological disasters. These challenges or this ecology of environmental concerns cannot be considered in a partitioned manner. The focus on temporality has been picked up by historians and others grappling with what the authors of the Anthropocene name a crisis and emergency. One text that speaks to the global climate change as apocalyptic temporality is Oreskes and Conway’s The Collapse of Western Civilization. In theorizing the present and the temporal possibilities for the future otherwise, these authors open the door for us to experiment with what Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun call socio­technical imaginaries (Citation2013). The book’s narrator is a Chinese historian in the year 2393. The historian says Western civilization possessed robust information about climate change and the ‘damaging events to unfold’ but was ‘unable to stop’ them (Oreskes & Conway, Citation2014, p. x, pp. 1-2), thus ‘condemning their successors to the inundation and desertification of the late twenty-first and twenty-second centuries’ (Oreskes & Conway, Citation2014, pp. 59–60). A second Dark Age descended, and the Period of Penumbra began. The present ignorance, the historian says, is a result of an ‘ideological fixation on ‘free’ markets; another compartmentalization and the practice among the scientific community of demanding an excessively stringent standard for accepting claims of any kind, even those involving imminent threats’ (Oreskes & Conway, Citation2014, pp. ix-x). In a sense, this future scenario tells nothing about the future and more about the ‘present’ – our moment. However, the narrator’s historical account is problematic and, as Garrard argues ‘unequivocably dangerous’, as the scenario focuses on ‘catastrophic outcomes’ (Garrard, Citation2020, p. 3). Gallard’s critique is important to our discussion of temporality. Narrating the present as a given history evades uncertainty and possibilities for the world as a project beyond global capital. In a sense, this dystopian temporality posits itself as the ‘truth’ of our reality as if punctuating a certain kind of imaginary temporal orientation – the only one about the future. This depicted history anticipates the failure of the future by drawing on assembled empirics and technologies of problem-solving as if failure and the future are not up for debate (Jasanoff, Citation2019), as if the historical codes and genre choices that assemble these dystopia future scenarios are not ‘originary’ to the familiar narratives of history which they ground. In highlighting that the Anthropocene is actually a ‘liberal managerial term’, Mann (Citation2019) suggests the ideology of liberalism distorts the multiple social reproductions of violence and strategies of failure by sublimating them through temporal means, deploying concepts such as crises, emergencies, and exceptions, and substituting adaptation for progress. We see this in scientific reports, for example, the SRl.5 and others; while they address the metabolic rifts and shifts, they still use the Anthropocene as the social contract (Mann, Citation2019). In Climate Leviathan, Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann argue crisis, risk, and uncertainty are asymmetrical, the result of the actions of a minority of humanity, i.e. the white male bourgeois European who claims the agency and writing of the historical narrative of liberalism and imperial capitalism. The Anthropocene is a technology co-productive of temporal regimes of modernity and the planetary order: [The Anthropocene is] an explicitly future facing instrument of temporal power. Like all contracts, it restarts time on its terms. The distribution of responsibilities it represents is always also the closure of supersession of past arrangements. So, a contract that has no expiration, like a constitution or the Anthropocene, is supposed to mark the end of the past and the beginning of a new time. (Mann & Wainwright, Citation2018, p. 8) The Anthropocene is itself a technology of temporal power which orders and organizes social life. In questioning this contract, Mann and Wainwright problematize how time is used to organize global power. They question whether the idea that the Anthropocene marks the end of the past as many claim and the beginning of a new time is accurate. For them, this fetishization of the Anthropocene evades the intensifying challenges to the world. The structure of ‘transition’ of the contemporary global order and the production of history of liberalism as progress (Mann & Wainwright, Citation2018, p. 9) are problematic and do not acknowledge how such kinds of politics are co-produced with a structure of transcendental time as their major procedural technology of governance. The transformation of the world’s political economy and the fundamental political arrangements most people take for granted thus need to be engaged on the register of the language of temporal power and the global order. Tsing argues the Anthropocene is entangled with the history of capitalism: ‘the most convincing Anthropocene timeline begins not with our species but rather with the advent of modern capitalism, which has directed long-distance destruction of landscapes and ecologies’ (Tsing, Citation2015, p. 19). For Tsing, this is the time to reimagine beyond Cartesian structures: ‘without Man and Nature, all creatures can come back to life, and men and women can express themselves without the strictures of a parochially imagined rationality’ (Tsing, Citation2015, p. vi). Her vision asks the reader to focus on the contemporary political reality and its contingent forms of violence, including how the material effects and the ‘time of climate change’ are themselves an extension of capitalism. Capitalism and its contingent forms of temporal power should be the focus of critique in our contemporary moment (Moore, Citation2015; Tsing, Citation2015). The Marxist radical tradition engages this critique. Some theorists examine ‘ecological rifts’ by challenging the thesis of the Anthropocene, taken for granted by writers like Oreskes and Conway. They argue the Anthropocene has attributed responsibility to humanity without accounting for racial capitalism (Robinson, Citation1983; Kelley, Citation2017; Verges, Citation2017), evading that this responsibility and indeed the crisis of social reproduction and exhaustion of nature ‘is the result of a minority of humanity’ (Hornborg, Citation2019; Mann, Citation2019). Ideas and language about depletion, acceleration, and exhaustion have recently been taken up by Jason Moore, who attempts to provide a view from the future to mobilize peoples to collectively challenge the ways we understand the historical nature of exhaustion. It is not capital or nature that is exhausted, he says, but ‘regionally specific relations of capitalization and appropriation’ (Moore, Citation2015, p. 123). For him, ‘exhaustion happens when particular natures–crystallised in specific re/production complexes–can no longer deliver more and more work/energy’ (Moore, Citation2015, p. 124). Maria Mies has spoken extensively about the exploitation at the centre of the global structure of capitalism. For Mies, women, nature, and colonies are penetrated, expropriated, and even obliterated through the co-production of primitive accumulation and the modern ecological-capitalist order (Mies, Citation1986, p. 77). Ahead of her time, Mies argues the history of capitalism was always globally ecological; it did not begin with Europe but was co-produced with colonization, nature and patriarchy on a world scale. Her analytics anticipate recent debates about the Anthropocene and how this patriarchal homosocial contract has not reckoned with the ways exploitation structures the uneven distribution of climate shifts and their catastrophic effects. In Fossil Capital, Andreas Malm examines the accelerating exhaustion of nature by an indifferent capitalism. This process, Malm argues, is spiral; the ‘more biophysical resources [capitalism] has withdrawn for profit-making, the more it is able to withdraw in the following round’ (Citation2018, p. 284). Moreover, ‘dissipation is not castigated or checked, but positively rewarded. The more the capitalist successfully exploits and wastes, the more he will be able to continue to do so – capitalist growth has ecological crisis wired into its DNA’ (Malm, Citation2018, p. 284, cited in Toscano, Citation2018, p. 13). As Alberto Toscano notes, Malm and Moore are concerned about the accelerated exhaustion of nature but approach the topic differently: The problem of exhaustion is for both an occasion to revisit the question of agency — Moore opting for a broadly ‘monist’ take on the ‘co-production’ of historical natures by capitalism through the ‘web of life,’ Malm a ‘dualist’ vision in which the impact of capital on nature is to be understood through the internal class antagonism sundering any putative ‘humanity’. (Toscano Citation2018, pp. 13-14) While the authors differ in their theoretical and methodological approaches, Toscano argues their interventions can be reconciled. Nature is ‘an internal limit to (the reproduction of) capital and capital .. . an internal limit to (the reproduction of) nature’ (Toscano, Citation2018, p. 131). Moore recently incorporated the concept of metabolic rift into a theoretical model of the longue durée of capitalism. Building on Fernard Braudel'sFootnote5 work and Wallersteinian world-systems theory, which conceptualize the macro-historical emergence of the conditions of metabolic rift in the rise of global markets, he advances the concept of systemic cycles of agro-ecological transformation punctuating the long-term development of capitalism, calling the metabolic rift the product of a ‘series of successive historical breaks in nutrient cycling’ (Moore, Citation2000, p. 127). This notion, he says, allows us to understand the emergence of ecological crises in the twenty-first century. Moving away from technology or imperialism as cause and effect, he articulates the reorganization of global ecology in terms of the logic of accumulation regimes of capital. Adopting a world-systems perspective, Moore points to how arguments of our long-term socio-spatial change depend on the growth of capitalism predicated centuries earlier on a crisis of feudalism. Upon confronting limits to extraction, feudal systems expanded outward. The imperialist Atlantic slavery and colonial expansion created the core–periphery dependency. The peripheries provided grain and raw materials to core regions, facilitating the conversion of agricultural lands, freeing an urban labour supply, and fueling industrialization. Global expansion gave rise to an enduring ecological inequality under a new extractive global division of labour and creating a metabolic rift in the form of diminished human relations and disturbed processes and cycles of nature (Malm, Citation2018). Moore argues primitive accumulation, or the dispossession of property under colonialism, can be conceptualized as multi­scalar. Colonial land consolidation and the separation of producers from their means of production enabled the emergence of capitalism at multiple organizational registers, including individual farms and national balances of trade and debt. An analysis of Moore’s theory and language of time would take more than this article. For now, I will simply focus on his articulation of time and his critique of Cartesian dualism. Moore speaks of ‘history as present’, arguing ‘human history is understood as an ‘unbroken circle’ of being, knowing, and doing’ (Citation2015, p. 36). He brings to the fore the historical interconnections of humans with nature and nature with humans. For him, this acknowledgement of capitalism and human implications in the environment, as well as the breaking of the natural boundaries and beyond the intra-capitalist limits, could mobilize people to do something about the present. Fernand Braudel argued the discipline of history offers an incomplete record if it does not take into account both the geological and the social changes operating in the longue durée and provide the conditions of possibility for the relatively short-term events and changes with which traditional history concerns itself (Brandel, Citation1992; Braudel, Citation1995). Like Braudel, Moore draws on this longue durée methodology and world systems analysis, often framed in terms of its spatial expansiveness, as it moves beyond the nation-state to consider global networks of centre and periphery. However, its temporal depth is equally integral to its accounts of longue durée economic and bioregional processes. The interdisciplinary development of ‘Big History’ takes deep time to new depths, seeking historical narratives that incorporate biological, metabolic, ecological, and geological scales. In Moore’s view, the ‘question of historical natures is a question of how the layers of historical time shape each other’ (Moore, Citation2015, p. 200). Moore stretches the temporal trajectory to unseat the possibility of human historical grand narratives focusing only on capitalism. Rather, ‘historical nature operates in a double register, as the field upon which capitalism unfolds–a field whose bounds are subject to revision–and as object’ (Moore, Citation2015, p. 234). He notes that ‘the drive to make the ‘time of nature’ [is] ever closer to the ‘time of capital’ (Citation2015, p. 234). This Capitalocene impulse changes nature, pointing to a clash ‘between the finite character of the biosphere and the infinite character of capital’s demands’ (Moore, Citation2015, pp. 234–235). To Moore, these impulses and processes suggest capitalism depends on a Cartesian dualism: capital would ‘go berserk in nature’ (Malm, Citation2018). Moore’s philosophy of history is inscribed with a structure of time which moves from attachments that exhaust and create antagonism to an attachment that dialectically mobilizes a planetary revolution. In Moore’s monist terms, all energy systems and human economies are ‘co-produced’ with nature. Thus, in thinking and understanding the present and the emerging futures ‘[o]nly a conception of historical nature will suffice’ (Moore, Citation2015, p. 296). But if nature is confined to the utopia of capitalism and capital’s history, then ‘nature’ can only be extended as a servile representation – a mimetic mode of what is experientially felt to be violence – and so is always already trapped inside a predefined meaning of what counts as ‘materiality’ and ‘history’. If theft and exhaustion interrupt the movement towards ‘nature’, and paradoxically make speciology (or what is nature; see the ancients’ idea of water, air, fire, earth and space) irrelevant for understanding materiality and history, then ethics and politics (insofar as they are grounded on this notion of nature) cannot simply be invoked, even negatively, as a model for thinking nature and even less so for dialectics and revolution (Marriott, Citation2011). Moore resolves this puzzle by coming up with an anthropological description of the theft and exhaustion of this nature that is singular, even if the radical singularity of that description remains bound to colonialism, enslavement and primitive accumulation as lived temporalities. Of course, Moore’s focus on capitalism’s dependence on world ecology is a perversion that cannot be worked out by stretching history or read through a theory of the structure of time and perversion; no concept or epistemology can attain the value of (non-perverse) mastery, as this situation is ‘originary’ to the history of enslavement and colonialism (Niblett, Citation2019). In The Sublime Perversion of Capital, Gavin Walker shows how capital segregates the world into nation-states through the apparatus of capture and assemblage of accumulation regimes: [W]e must always treat the process of primitive accumulation as a dual process: on the one hand, it connotes the untraceable historical emergence of labor power which can be commodified, and on the other hand, it is a historical site of the Ur-AktFootnote6 that founded and ordered the world as a nomos, as a system. These two aspects are, intimately joined: the first sets in motion the paradoxical cycle of social relations called ‘capital,’ while the second organizes the ‘formation of difference’ through which the earth’s surface is recoded as a ‘forcefield’ of the order. (Walker, Citation2012, p. 118) The making of this order and its contingent social contracts is based on ‘primitive accumulation’ and its mutations (Marx, Citation1967; Agathangelou, Citation2019; Agathangelou & Ahmed, Citation2020; Sakai & Solomon, Citation2006, p. 28). Walker argues the state comes to be understood as the ‘ultimate model of the capitalist axiomatic’, thereby identifying the nation with the ‘origin’ of the rational and universal process of exchange (Walker, Citation2012, p. 122). However, this is a demented and paradoxical process caught between the logic of capital, nation-state and ‘history.’ Thus, it is not enough to point to capital’s historiography, colonial and genocidal, and its ‘teleological thrust’ (Marriott, Citation2012, p. 53). If the aim is to challenge capital’s history, then we have to contest capitalism’s colonialisms and genocides ‘in a more general description of its language of time’ (Marriott, Citation2012). The logic of capital depends on the language of retrojection as a temporal grammar to surpass its limits and to posit itself anew in the way it exploits and obliterates species and nature (Malm, Citation2018). If we do not contest these retrojective linguistic mechanisms of time, we will continue participating in the same capture and theft upon which the ecological regime of racial global capital depends. On the one hand, this moment of capture, cycles back to itself, ‘harness[ing] its hazardous flux retrospectively, to conjure itself up as if its origin were a mere testament to its necessary emergence’ (Walker, Citation2012, p. 157). On the other, history or the history of the capture is a fait accompli from the vantage point of the racial capitalocene (Walker, Citation2012, p. 157). Moore acknowledges exhaustion and its acceleration are a result of ‘capital’s appropriation of unpaid work [which] transcends the Cartesian divide, encompassing both human and extra- human work as outside, but necessary to, the circuit of capital and the production of value’ (Moore, Citation2017, p. 329). However, dialectical history emerges as a question in his analysis because of the ‘metabolic shift’. The teleology seems to creep in to supervene in the situating of the ‘revolutionary ecology’ as an end. Without theorizing explicitly the structure of language of time of ecological revolution, it is not possible to invent (Fanon, Citation1967) ‘a future … that is radically unwriteable’ or a ‘tabula rasa’ which ‘opens in return a movement of temporalization that is never simply present, or timely’ (Fanon, Citation1967; Marriott, Citation2011, p. 54). An engagement with this structure and its language points to the technologies of racial capitalocene, including Cartesian dualism which is a temporal method of translating retrojectively the otherwise unsignified energies of existence. Walker argues, ‘We are always arriving on the stage of history after the fold in power has already taken place. This fold in power is constantly being renewed through its temporality, which is inherently retrospectively projected’ (Walker, Citation2012, p. 152). We can formulate a more productive response to those who argue that we can imagine the end of the world but not racial capitalocene once we grapple with the relations of the structure of time to the paradoxical suspension of time or what Fanon and Marriott call the new beginnings (Fanon, Citation1967; Marriott, Citation2011). Primitive accumulation, (‘the internal energy of African slaves and Indigenous lands’ (da Silva, Citation2018)), ‘is not a period, but a cyclically reproduced logical moment’ (Walker, Citation2012, p. 119) that becomes history by repeating itself every day. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of primitive accumulation as the mounting of an apparatus of capture, Walker suggests the capitalist system presupposes this violent process. In this sense, the linear notion of history that characterizes explanations of the racial capitalocene and its contingent projects is paradoxical (Deleuze & Guattari, Citation1987, p. 447). Capitalism cyclically-recursively repeats the moment of the mounting of capture apparatus within the sphere of social relations as a ‘crisis’. These acts are impossible to ‘historicize’ as ‘they are an irreparable moment of the modern condition, whose effects we are still living through … That is, we ourselves have always-already been ‘enclosed,’ and therefore the historicization of enclosure throws us back on the very limit of historicity itself’ (Walker, Citation2012, p. 102). And yet, the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences insist ‘historicizing’ through linear, eschatological narratives and dialectics (Agathangelou, Citation2016; Marriott, Citation2011). Marriott goes even further. He puts pressure on the rush to historicize in the form of dramatic narratology or dialectics. He argues that history is a colonial violent racist machinery. In his words, After all, what brings race into being as an historical concept is the European invention of Man, which also gave birth to its multiple others, whose relationship to history is necessarily one of a relegated past. So perhaps, for Fanon, in the colony, history as a discipline became, quite precisely, racist: a narrative whose redoubtable but all the more easily identified representations are the clearest example of a discursive machinery of power. If we take seriously this ‘historical’ production that depends on relegating others to the past, then a historical contextualization or dating of capitalism by highlighting how nature has been ignored or how ‘the history of capitalist origins … is also the origins of ecological crisis’ (Moore Citation2017, p. 2) cannot resolve this ‘crisis.’ It leaves untouched colonialism and ‘the description of its language of time’ (Marriott, Citation2012, p. 53) and the temporal narratives that orient us toward crisis or aporias and by extension the need for ecological revolution. For Rob Nixon, violence is an ecological question, and time and representation are entangled: ‘Slow violence occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’ (Nixon, Citation2011, pp. 2–3). Ecological injustice revealed through the ‘slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes’ disproportionately affects people of colour and the Global South (Nixon, Citation2011, p. 2). These ‘gradual’ catastrophes challenge the linear and historical ecological crisis narratives and their notions of temporality whose cause and effect logic demand certain kinds of reparations and responses. They challenge a contemporary quick/urgent media ecology more suited to telling stories about disasters. The entanglement of time and representation is all-encompassing (Callaway, Citation2014; Clark, Citation2011). Yet we have to remember the effect of the politics of representation on the registers of grammars and logics of colonialism and global racial capitalism and its environmental expropriations and devastations as a planetary project. Simply focusing on first principles evades that colonialism and global racial capitalism have not only immured ecologies and species but have also immured the writing of ecological history, the writing of the planetary, including systems of thought such as those produced by black, postcolonial, and indigenous thinkers/activists (Marriott, Citation2011). Thus, while materials such as narratives, codes, genres, and genealogies of colonialism and enslavement block the potentiality of the colonized, they are equally able to block the recursive processes and practices that inform conversation on the postponement of the catastrophe of the planetary. Such ‘a/historical’ asymmetries can never escape the concept of history, thereby allowing racial capitalism to seize upon given differences to continue its business as usual (Marriott, Citation2012). As we think this through, we can see how, through environmental economics of growth, ecological experiments with linear, eschatological and retrojective structures of time and the temporalizing of desires and hazards, capital evades its biggest secret: capital cannot produce ecologies and life. It can enslave, colonize, engage in theft of land as property, and commodify ecologies and life into labour power and obliterate those it needs as its ‘basis for defining time’ (Rifkin, Citation2017, p. vii; Johnson, Citation2000) and for gaining coherence of its projects, but it cannot make life or beings. The enslaved, colonized, labour, and planetary power do not exist as such. They are co-produced with the language of colonial time and global colonial planetary projects. Walker comments: Labor power is called into being when its use-value, labor, is employed in the process of production. At that point, labor power is retrospectively made to have existed; in other words, its basic temporality is exactly the future anterior (‘it will have been’) .. . When capital needs to expand, it presumes the existence of frontiers and free lands and a supply of labor power but it conceals to itself the ecological hazard of securing these supplies. It posits for itself a semblance which fills the void and allows the circular logic of its cycle to smoothly continue (Walker, Citation2012, p. 187). This intervention highlights how capitalism’s logics and grammars depend on retrojection as a structuring temporal modality. In this sense, capitalism is able to sustain in place the fiction that it creates everything, even when it does not, thereby re-asserting its ineluctability. Thus, time turns into a technology of explaining away the problems that capitalism itself helps generate via ever more radical accounts of ecological catastrophes and disasters. Moore goes even further in his notion of the Capitalocene when he says capitalism is a ‘world-ecology joining the accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power, and co-production of nature in a dialectical unity’ (Moore, Citation2015, p. 3). He takes the Capitalocene as his geo-poetics to describe a problem of ‘untimely ends’ by placing it within the larger world-ecology. Yet we still need to place the empirical question of an untimely ecological problem (i.e. capitalist exhaustion and acceleration) in terms of what describes the end of this problem, even if this is not the last day of the problem, that is, the instance when the problem ends (Agamben, Citation2009, p. 62). Examples disguised as facts are simply codes and genres of an epistemological model; however, by not just asking but also answering questions of what is right and wrong (Kverndokk & Bjaerke, Citation2019, p. 301), they orient us towards a certain possibility of the end of the problem. This orientation is the force that sustains the co-production of the racial ecological order and its dynamics and ‘nature’ (ecologies and enslaved lives) as zero time-and zero value. In a sense, Moore’s experimentation with this geo-poetics challenges the linear time of capital but remains within the logics and grammars of capital whose deployment of recursive time is a central structuring technology of violence. Moore’s analytics do not orient us towards the apocalypse but towards the time that lies between the announcement of the end of capitalism as the root problem of the planetary crises and a perpetually postponed end. Though not apocalyptic, this geo-poetics reinserts an idea of the ‘time of the now’ (Agamben, Citation2009, p. 61), the history of the present. But the disjointed ‘presentism’ of the subject, the market, nature and their removal from chronological time does not necessarily mean a more just relationship.

3 Environmental racism as state-sanctioned racial violence This brings us to the state. If environmental racism is part of racial capitalism, then its regulation becomes the province of the state. Kurtz (2009) has observed that the racial state has been overlooked by EJ scholars. Fortunately, researchers have begun analyzing state programs and practices, showing how the state needs to be problematized (Holifield, 2007; Harrison, 2015; Konisky, 2015). Earlier I presented literature indicating that the state has not seriously sought to intervene in the environmental racism gap. Indeed, the state is deeply invested in not solving the environmental racism gap because it would be too costly and disruptive to industry, the larger political system, and the state itself. Instead, the state has developed numerous initiatives in which it goes through the motions, or, ‘performs’ regulatory activity, especially participation (London, Sze, and Lievanos, 2008; Kohl, 2015), without producing meaningful change. The problem is not a lack of knowledge or skill, but a lack of political will that must be attributed to racial capitalism. Environmental racism must be seen in the context of a long line of diverse forms of statesanctioned violence that facilitates racial capitalism. The fact that it is disproportionately people of color who are bearing the burden of industrial pollution enables industry to continue despite a mounting death toll. Ma´rquez calls this devaluation of people of color a ‘racial state of expendability’, which he describes as ‘[a] fundamental and existential life devaluation, a perpetual susceptibility to obliteration with legal impunity’ (2013: 44). This concept illuminates how racism underwrites industrial activity not only through profits, but also through subsidized goods and services for all. Legal impunity is key, as it helps explains why there is no meaningful action to address the environmental racism gap which, in turn, underscores the centrality of environmental racism to racial capitalism. As scholars are beginning to show – the state refuses to implement meaningful initiatives in order to maintain racial capitalism. Capital does not have to actually address environmental justice issues because it knows there will be minor, if any, sanctions. Indeed, bureaucrats seek to avoid the anger of conservatives by not enforcing the law (Kates, 2014). The state is not about to dismantle this ‘ecological service’ that allows firms to remain competitive in the global marketplace. When we put together these two facts – the devaluation of people of color, plus capital acting with legal impunity – environmental racism must Pulido 529 be understood as state-sanctioned racial violence. So what does this mean for EJ? There are implications for both scholars and activists. In terms of activism we need to change how we view the state and our relationship to it. Far too often the state is seen as an ally, or neutral force. Indeed, even when people lose faith in the state, they often still turn to it because there is no other apparent alternative. Much of the EJ movement has become too implicated in the state itself. What is needed is to begin seeing the state as an adversary that must be confronted in a manner similar to industry. This suggests a twopronged struggle, against both polluters and the state, which will certainly not be easy. For researchers, our task is not only to develop a research agenda that recognizes the degree to which environmental racism is a function of racial capitalism, but one that is also linked to the needs of vulnerable communities. Environmental racism will not be solved by a research agenda that reaffirms the boundaries and frameworks established by the Environmental Protection Agency. Indeed, we should help expose the fraudulent nature of the state, how it has sought to co-opt EJ communities, its support of racial capitalism and its willingness to forsake poisoned communities. Together, we can generate new strategies to rebuild a movement that truly works towards environmental justice.

The national security, humanitarian, and migration management responses reinforce the abyssal divide by casting the North as superior and civilized while invoking the spectre of disorderly, disruptive, dark-skinned migrant invaders. These frameworks reflect a “desire to preserve the apparent normalcy of an imagined social order that the monstrous, future-conditional climate change migrant threatens to overwhelm” (Baldwin 2016, p. 81). Without making an explicit reference to race, these responses suggest that the future of white supremacy depends on its ability to manage and contain the teeming masses from the South that climate change threatens to unleash. Indeed, some scholars have observed that the discourse on climate change and migration weaponizes fear and could produce a “pre-emptive race war in which the survival of one population is pursued at the expense of another” (Baldwin 2016, p. 86). Arguably, elements of this race war have already begun on the borders of the US, Australia, and the EU. An analysis grounded in racial capitalism must address the question of who benefits from the policies that stoke racism and militarize borders. There appear to be at least six distinct groups of beneficiaries. The most immediate beneficiaries are the corporations that contract with governments to provide highly lucrative security, surveillance, border wall construction, and privately operated prisons and detention facilities (Lowenstein 2015, Olivares 2016, Bhattacharyya 2018). A second set of beneficiaries consists of state security apparatuses whose staff and budget swell in order to administer the detention and expulsion of ever-growing numbers of migrants (Bhattacharyya 2018). A third group of beneficiaries includes the businesses which gain economically when detained migrants are forced to provide low-paid, indentured labour akin to that performed by persons incarcerated for criminal offenses (Richards and Peña 2017). These businesses also benefit from temporary migration schemes and from the exploitation of undocumented workers. A fourth group of beneficiaries comprises states in geographical proximity to Northern states (transit states such as Mexico, Libya and Morocco) which are able to obtain monetary compensation, political concessions or trade benefits by agreeing to limit the movement of migrants (Bhattacharyya 2018). A fifth group of beneficiaries consists of criminal enterprises that specialize in the trafficking of undocumented migrants and can charge higher fees as border controls increase (Wood 2018). Finally, authoritarian demagogues in the global North benefit from stoking hatred of migrants and other racialized groups in order to create a wedge between economically subordinated groups. By demonizing migrants and other racialized groups, these demagogues secure the support of working class whites for policies that intensify economic inequality, destroy social safety nets, and hasten catastrophic climate change (Hochschild 2016, Bhattacharyya 2018, Metzl 2019). In an insightful and provocative article titled Human Rights and Root Causes, Susan Marks (2011) analyzes the perils of treating human rights abuses as random misfortunes that can be remedied if only perpetrators adopted better practices, laws and policies. She calls for an examination of the systemic causes of injustice, and argues that scholars and activists should spend less time pursuing state-oriented reforms that demobilize oppositional activity and more time channeling grievances into organized and coherent action. A race-conscious decolonial narrative of climate justice that examines the cradle-to-grave impacts of carbon capitalism has the potential to unite diverse and powerful social movements that reject militarism, extractivism, economic inequality and racism. As Naomi Klein observes, social justice struggles are often compartmentalized: The anti-austerity people rarely talk about climate change, the climate change people rarely talk about war or occupations. We rarely make the connection between the guns that take black lives on the streets of US cities and in police custody and the much larger forces that annihilate so many black lives on arid land and in precarious boats around the world. (Klein 2016, p. 10) The expansive concept of climate justice articulated in Section 2 of this article, including the notion of the racialized abyssal line, can serve as the glue that holds these diverse social movements together and provides a framework for transnational mobilization. In order to achieve climate justice, it is also necessary to develop legal approaches to climate displacement around which social movements and climate-vulnerable states can coalesce in order to push back against the national security, humanitarian, and migration management approaches. Scholars have long recognized that international law is constrained as a tool of resistance due to its epistemological complicity with structural violence against humans and non-human nature (Lindgren 2018). Influenced by Enlightenment philosophers, international law universalized the idea that humans are obligated to dominate nature, and created racial hierarchies that justify the objectification, dehumanization, dispossession, and exploitation of societies that differ from Euro-American norms. Moreover, the Western legal model’s individualistic focus is ill-equipped to recognize and remedy systemic injustice (Gonzalez 2015).

3 Why Not Social Vulnerability? In the second edition of their 1994 book on hazard vulnerability, Wisner et al. (2004) define social vulnerability as the “set of characteristics of a group or individual in terms of their capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impact of a natural hazard” (p. 9). While they discuss the root causes of vulnerabilities and note that socially vulnerable groups are often treated as victims, the definition they provide reflects the uncritical nature of much subsequent literature on social vulnerability. Social vulnerability literature is rife with discussions that attribute vulnerability to the supposed intrinsic characteristics of individuals and groups instead of the structural causes that force communities of color, poor, disabled, elderly, and health-compromised folks to bear the brunt of disasters (Bolin, 2006; Jacobs, 2019). The social vulnerability literature in urban planning and related fields is dominated by studies that map so-called vulnerable populations. This mapping essentially amounts to counting non-white, disabled and poor people, households without access to a vehicle and single womanheaded households, along with other characteristics. Once all these so-called destitute populations are added up, they are mapped in red and called “hot spots” (Cutter et al., 2000; Cutter & Finch, 2008; Finch et al., 2010; Van Zandt et al., 2012). There are few social vulnerability mapping studies that include conversations with these “vulnerable” populations or critical conversations about the root causes of vulnerability. These hot spots are largely treated as passive populations that magically became vulnerable, or, even worse, by their own faults (Jacobs, 2019). Fortunately, there are fields that do better jobs of unpacking and critiquing the term “vulnerability” than hazards and disaster literature in urban planning. Development studies scholars critique the notion of vulnerability. Bankoff (2001) discusses vulnerability as a western construct imposed on the developing world that construct the Global South as dangerous with little consideration of how colonialism and imperialism produced and continue to exacerbate said vulnerability. The concept is also critiqued as overused and paternalistic to those designated as vulnerable (Chambers, 2006). A critical disabilities scholar, Burghardt (2013) contends that vulnerability is “a social construct that limits the lives of people with disabilities due to its implication of weakness and need and its inattention to socially imposed barriers” (p. 557). Burghardt (2013) also points out that the designation of vulnerable imposes contradictory roles on populations both assuming that they need charity-like protection from the state and its systems and also denying them the right to participate in systems, and to some extent, society. This critique of vulnerability becomes even more salient when we consider how ableism and other forms of oppression intersect with racial capitalism, shaping, impacting, and reinforcing each other, as will be discussed in a subsequent section of this essay. In a critique of social vulnerability within disaster studies, Bolin (2006) insists that the study of disasters “requires a historically informed understanding of the particularities of racial formations in specific places and times and how those shape the environmental risks to which people are exposed” (p. 116). Bolin (2006) encourages the use of an environmental justice lens instead of social vulnerability for hazards as it makes visible the “complex mechanisms by which certain ethnic (and racial, gendered and classed) categories of people are disadvantaged” (p. 117). Hardy et al. (2017) echo this in an a study of racial coastal formation, insisting that if “deeply racialized history goes unrecognized, what [they] label colorblind [climate change] adaptation planning is likely to perpetuate the”slow violence” of environmental racism” (p. 62). While there are valid critiques of environmental justice activism and scholarship taking a less critical turn (Harrison, 2015; Pulido, 2000), there are many environmental justice scholars who explicitly take racism and white supremacy to task (Bullard, 2008; Pellow, 2017; Pulido, 2015; Taylor, 2000). In the next section, I take cues from Pulido (2016a & 2016b) who contends that environmental racism — the antithesis of environmental justice — is but a component of racial capitalism. I argue that racial capitalism, and its intersections with sexism, ageism, and ableism, can help us understand the root causes and impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Feminist analyses of the historical dynamics of gender systems are fundamental to the work of challenging growth-driven political economies, and of designing more equitable and balanced ecosocial systems. Feminist theories and methods that acknowledge and support diverse voices, knowledges, and practices are vital resources for building on heterodox degrowth movements. In dialogue with postcolonial, decolonial, indigenous, and anti-racist efforts, intersectional feminisms have been unlearning and disrupting conventional politics of knowing and action in ways that help forge more inclusive understandings and applications necessary for degrowth futures. Degrowth Journal Volume 1 (2023) 00046 With the purpose of highlighting advances on these three fronts, this essay was co-written by participants in the Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance (FaDA), an inclusive network of activists and scholars that has supported an array of collaborative initiatives. FaDA’s birthplace was the 5th International Conference on Degrowth in Budapest in 2016, where a surprisingly large turnout for the roundtable Degrowth and feminism(s): Conflicts, intersections, and convergences between two radical political movements motivated the establishment of the FaDA mailing list, our main means of communication. FaDA participation reflects the diversity of degrowth advocates in general: a 2017 survey (Iserlohn, 2018) revealed that members bring varying activist, academic, household, and professional experiences from wide-ranging contexts around the world. This essay is illuminated with examples from our own journeys toward more inclusive and mutual learning across languages, nationalities, cultures, gender identities, and time zones, all challenges engaged in the co-writing process. xThe main part of this text explores powerful contributions from feminist thought and practice. We then identify a set of important issues and approaches advanced by feminisms and degrowth scholarship, and point to potential for further work along these lines. Our conclusions draw on histories of movement-building across diverse feminisms worldwide to strategize ways to strengthen degrowth alliances toward shared goals of emancipatory ecosocial transformation. 1. Marginalizing exclusions or fertile synergies? Widespread consensus that degrowth horizons are broadened by the celebration of plural knowledges, practices, and worldviews coexists in tension with dynamics that have worked to empower and publicize certain strands of degrowth, while obscuring others. Degrowth Journal Volume 1 (2023) 00046 In recent decades, some scholars have disseminated degrowth research and analyses in scholarly books and in journals like Ecological Economics and the Journal of Cleaner Production. This work has been essential to increasing visibility and advancing the shared cause. Intellectual genealogies and literature reviews have often portrayed these authors, predominantly European men, as the main (or only) founding fathers and protagonists of degrowth, using this single strand to represent all degrowth thought and action. Meanwhile, feminist, decolonial, and anti-racist voices from many parts of the world have been contributing strongly to degrowth conversations and directions through conferences, graduate courses, publications, and other initiatives. They have worked to co-construct degrowth communities and movements, and have influenced degrowth visions, including conceptualizations and embodiments of pluriversality. Amid growing appreciation of the generative force of these essential strands, numerous scholars have raised questions about why feminist, decolonial, and anti-racist voices are under- or misrepresented in so many characterizations of degrowth (e.g. Andreucci & Engel-Di Mauro, 2019; Dengler & Seebacher, 2019; Gregoratti & Raphael, 2019; Nirmal & Rocheleau, 2019; Richter, 2022; Schulken et al., 2022). Rather than call out specific authors who propagate limited and limiting portrayals of degrowth, we point here to one public representation of the field. At 10,650 words and 132 sources, the Wikipedia entry on degrowth is remarkably long at the time of this writing (22 May, 2022). Equally remarkable is its underrepresentation of the feminist contributions that have shaped degrowth thought and practice—contributions partially reflected in the 70 sources cited in this essay in Degrowth. Wiki entries are constantly evolving, and some time before our May 2022 reading, editors added a section on “feminism” and a section on “intersectional feminism.” Curiously, however, combined these sections only mention three papers from the wealth of feminist degrowth work that has burgeoned in the 21st century. The limitation of nearly all citations to publications from the 1980s and 1990s makes it seem as if feminism was something done Degrowth Journal Volume 1 (2023) 00046 only by earlier generations and suggests that current feminisms are not actively contributing to degrowth thought and praxis. How has one strand of degrowth become a proxy for the much broader whole? Can future horizons be enriched by more sincere and public engagement with contributions from feminist political ecology, feminist ecological economics, feminist economics, feminist new materialism, ecofeminisms, postcolonial feminisms, decolonial feminisms, communitarian feminisms, Black feminisms, indigenous feminisms, queer feminisms, anarcha-feminisms, anti-racist feminisms, among others? 2. Power of feminisms and degrowth synergies Feminist research and analysis has contributed to understanding the roles that historically specific gender systems have played in facilitating growth, revealing that the growth paradigm is not merely a dynamic that drives production and consumption on local and global scales, but to that end also tangles deeply with gendered norms, practices, and subjectivities. This first contribution of feminist studies strengthens degrowth capacities to imagine and to adapt gender systems that support different paths. Human biology, sociocultural practice, and changing environments continually interact to create astonishingly diverse ways of being human. Gender and queer studies show how diversity within and among societies is essential to vitality and adaptation in human history, and also reveal how currently dominant systems that differentiate people in hierarchical and exploitative ways limit progress towards goals of care and equitable wellbeing. The rise of capitalism and fossil-fueled industrial technologies was enabled by the establishment of violent colonial and racial systems that mobilized war and commerce to expropriate Indigenous Peoples’ lands, enslave labor, and harness diverse local gender systems to increase productivity and profit. Colonial capitalist restructuring of gender norms and identities accompanied shifts in human ecological relations involving the separation of economic production from ecosocial reproduction, and the ascendance of a new ideology that dualistically Degrowth Journal Volume 1 (2023) 00046 separated culture from nature, which was portrayed as a mechanism and passive resource (Merchant, 1990). The separation of production, which came to be associated with masculinity, from reproduction, associated with femininity, interacted with other historical changes. These included adaptations of inherited patriarchal social relations, new kinds of colonizing states, and expansion of long-distance trade. All worked together to mobilize old and new forms of coercion and exploitation of labor and other natural resources. The emergence and establishment of this globalizing gendered and racial capitalist society has depended on the periodic expansion and intensification of its regimes of accumulation, and on new masculinities and femininities through which crises in the domain of production are externalized into the domain of reproduction (Federici, 2004, 2021; Mies & Bennholdt-Thomsen, 2000; Robinson, 2020). State command and control over sexuality and reproduction, witch-hunts, new misogyny among guilds, merchant exploitation through the putting out system, transatlantic slave trade, plantation slavery, and forced labor in fleets and mines operated together to develop interlocking systems of oppression on global scales. The gendered and racialized class hierarchies of those systems persist to this day, notably in the continued subalternization of the domain of social reproduction. In contexts of modernity, thought and discourse about race, gender, and sexuality became characterized by categorical, dichotomous, and hierarchical forms that promote the dehumanization of women’s and men’s bodies, especially in the global south (Lugones, 2010). This system of oppression linked subordinate forms of masculinity with dangerous and degrading labor, while linking femininity with the unpaid work of reproducing socialized laborers and regenerating labor capacities through nourishment, nurture, and emotional care. At the same time, a political affiliation between some masculinities and the modernizing culture of racial capitalism has worked to sustain a “patriarchy of Degrowth Journal Volume 1 (2023) 00046 the wage” (Federici, 2021). Challenging the growth imperative crucially involves curbing the reproduction of masculinities and femininities that are subjected to and subjectified by this imperative. Creating degrowth futures depends crucially on feminist innovation, retrieval, and adaptation of other gendered ecologies. A second powerful contribution from feminisms are methods and theories that acknowledge and support diverse voices, knowledges, and practices. People in different positions and contexts are exploring degrowth as a field of research, a network of social movements, a community of scholar-activists, a way of life, or a vision for desirable futures. An even broader range of people and movements may contribute to—and benefit from—degrowth transitions. As Patricia E. Perkins (2010, p. 5) makes clear, “Degrowth needs to include people from a diversity of gender, race, class, and geographic perspectives FROM THE START [sic] in order to build a strong, resilient, and politically-dynamic framework for eco-socio-political change.” Yet, we face powerful legacies of division and exclusion. In contemporary societies, including in natural and social sciences, power operates through historically specific hierarchical binaries that have been disseminated with colonial capitalism and globalization, and have been internalized (or resisted) in various ways around the world. Superiority and domination of humans over other nature have been conceptually and structurally interconnected with colonizer over colonized, white over non-white, man over woman, hetero-normative over queer, capitalist over worker, and nation-state over community. Structures and institutions through which these divisions are sustained and reproduced work in complex ways to frustrate attempts at mutually fruitful relationships and alliances across differences. Emerging at the confluence of critiques of humans-over-nature and critiques of colonizer-over-colonized, conversations about degrowth offer ways towards deeper interrogation of these historical hierarchies. Since its earliest articulations (Gorz, 1980; Illich, 1974; Latouche, 1986), degrowth diverged from mainstream Degrowth Journal Volume 1 (2023) 00046 development and environmental stances by seeking ways for “developed” societies, positioned as colonizers, to reduce negative impacts on other people and environments, starting with efforts to dismantle ideologies of the growth imperative. Yet, societal projects based on downscaling growth and global exploitation, even those that prioritize conviviality and cooperation, do not guarantee relations free of sexism, racism, and other forms of exploitation and oppression. For example, although racism has been explicitly recognized by environmental justice scholars and activists, serious work still needs to be done on the roles that racialization and white privilege play in dynamics that drive growth, as well as in those that may support just and equitable degrowth (Tyberg, 2020). Some critical awareness is activated via alliances with anti-colonial, anti-racist, ecofeminist, and other movements that address interconnected hierarchies. However, powerful institutions for production and dissemination of knowledge have been operating in ways that construe these perspectives as less valid than mainstream science and marginalize their topics and analyses as irrelevant to economic and ecological knowledge. These structural legacies continue to limit efforts to bring voices and visions together towards emancipatory ecosocial transformation. There is no doubt that diversifying degrowth movements is an important means towards this end. But, as the network Diversifying and Decolonizing Economics (d-econ) reminds us, diversifying is not the same as decolonizing. While the former is important for epistemic justice and likely to bring other questions and perspectives to the table, decolonization and decoloniality furthermore require collective unlearning of Eurocentric and androcentric knowledges and practices, and the provision of fertile soil in which new collaborative knowledges and practices can flourish. In this regard, histories of feminist solidarity and movement building, especially coordinating local struggles transnationally (e.g., on issues of food, land, development dispossession, and anti-war/peace), offer important lessons for degrowth scholarship and activism. Degrowth Journal Volume 1 (2023) 00046 A third power of synergies among feminisms and degrowth lies in the potential for creating new spaces and modes of knowledge production. Degrowth and feminist proponents share an appreciation of different ways of learning and kinds of understanding that go beyond conventional western scientific approaches; some of many journeys on this front are described in “Pluriversal learning: pathways toward a world of many worlds” (Paulson, 2018). Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance is a living example of experimentation with forms of knowledge production that incorporates diverse positions and perspectives. Venturing beyond topics usually associated with feminism, FaDA members have organized and joined workshops and panels at international conferences on degrowth, ecological economics, anthropology, and other subjects, and provided respective groups with guidelines for feminist conference organizing. Continuous experimentation with self-organized collective projects is exemplified by processes in March and April 2020, when FaDA channeled spontaneous interaction to understand and respond to situations provoked by the coronavirus. Conversation among more than 40 participants from five continents led to collaborative writing of two statements: “Feminist degrowth reflections on COVID-19 and the Politics of Social Reproduction” (FaDA 2020a) and “Collaborative Feminist Degrowth: Pandemic as an Opening for a Care-Full Radical Transformation” (FaDA 2020b). Commitment to include a wide variety of interlocutors in the conversation inspired translations of the messages into Finnish, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Turkish. The call for a “Care-full radical transformation” begins: “The crisis we face as a global community must be understood not only as a public health crisis, or as an economic crisis of the capitalist mode of production, but also, fundamentally, as a crisis of the reproduction of life. In this sense, it is a crisis of care: the work of caring for humans, non-humans, and the shared biosphere.” Degrowth Journal Volume 1 (2023) 00046 Recent flourishing of feminist degrowth is contributing to more comprehensive origin stories by digging for obscured feminist roots of degrowth and is fostering convergences of perspectives and creative alliances. In light of these successes, and despite them, FaDA members continue to struggle with unlearning those values, assumptions, and structures that hinder feminist-informed degrowth, including racist, colonialist, hetero-patriarchal, speciesist, ableist, and classist undercurrents that unconsciously guide all of our thinking and practice. Although transdisciplinary research has long worked toward alignment between knowledge and practice (Gibbons, 1999), it is still a struggle to bridge knowledge systems in ways that do not reinforce hegemonic positivist academia, epicenter of the colonial system (Grosfoguel, 2008). Feminisms and degrowth motivate complementary efforts to move away from hierarchical relations and systems of knowledge that have constituted the colonial matrix of power (Quijano, 2000). A fundamental strategy for FaDA has been to create commons for unlearning, learning, and writing. This is facilitated by ongoing open FaDA meetings and topical events, as well as virtual check-ins on the well-being of members, and live gatherings like a 2022 workshop that brought 60 participants from a dozen countries to Lund, Sweden, to explore feminisms and degrowth horizons. The toolkit of the degrowth movement can be fortified with similar commoning processes. Projects such as this essay, co-written by seven participants from nearly as many countries, have generated confusions, unexpected doubts, and painful misunderstandings that prevent linear progress. Moving toward communal forms of intellectual work, we have come to appreciate ways in which more difficult journeys can be more fruitful, and to trust the process of writing as a goal and reward in itself. The constitution of text through the entanglement of our varied writings/lines/thoughts/onto-epistemologies/desires forges communal processes of "becoming" that portray experiences of "betweenness" (SonettiGonzález et al., forthcoming). In sum, even as collaboration across differences Degrowth Journal Volume 1 (2023) 00046 multiplies confusions and changes, it has also multiplied learning and unlearning in processes that have become vital for us. 3. Issues and approaches that feminisms and degrowth synergy is already advancing and can further strengthen With the aim of motivating readers to explore opportunities toward further synergies, we provide here a non-comprehensive glimpse of the rich work that has been published in many languages and diverse media around selected issues in feminisms and degrowth. FaDA collaborators are working on a longer article that will present and reflect on a broader range of literature. • Care economies, commoning care, caring masculinities, and interspecies care (Aulenbacher & Riegraf, 2018; Borowy & Aillon, 2017; D’Alisa & Catteano, 2013; Dengler & Lang, 2022; Paulson et al., 2022(a); Paulson et al., 2022(b)\; Tummers & MacGregor, 2019; Winker, 2015) • Crises (war, anthropocene, COVID) (Bahn, Cohen & Rodgers, 2020; Bock, 2021; FaDA, 2020a; FaDA, 2020b; Raworth, 2014; Riquito, 2021; Paulson, 2022; Paulson, 2020) • Decolonial, intersectional, and global south approaches (Abazeri, 2022; Dengler & Seebacher, 2019, Mehta & Harcourt, 2021; Nirmal & Rocheleau, 2019; Paulson, 2021; Pietilä, 2006, Salleh, 2020; Svampa, 2015) • Design, technology, and practical innovations (Bell et al., 2020; Gaziulusoy & Houtbeckers, 2018; Houtbeckers & Gaziulusoy, 2019; Kawgan-Kagan, 2015; Paulson, 2022; White, 2020) • Ecofeminisms (Pérez Orozco & Mason-Deese, 2022; Perkins, 2019; Picardi et al., 2022; Saave, 2022; Salleh, 2017) • Gender and political economic systems (Andreucci et al., 2019; Akbulut, 2021; Barca et al., 2019; Gregoratti & Raphael, 2019) • Programs and policies (basic income, wages for housework, green new deals, UN) (Katada, 2012; Paulson & Paulson-Smith, 2021; Piccardi & Barca, 2022; Schulz, 2017; Zelleke, 2021) Degrowth Journal Volume 1 (2023) 00046 • Social reproduction, labor, and invisible economy (Barca, 2019; Bauhardt, 2014; Dengler & Strunk 2018; Salleh, 2017; Saave-Harnack, Dengler & Muraca, 2019; Saave & Muraca, 2021) • Societal transformations, climate justice, and utopias (Aulenbacher & Riegraf, 2018; Andreucci & Engel-Di Mauro, 2019; Akbulut, 2021; Barca, Chertkovskaya & Paulsson, 2019; Khanna, 2021; Pérez-Orozco & MasonDeese, 2022; Perkins, 2019; Solón, 2019; Winker, 2015) 4. Conclusion In this essay, we showed three central strategies to mobilize synergies among feminisms and degrowth toward shared purposes of emancipatory transformation. The first strategy is to apply understandings of the historical dynamics of gender systems to challenge growth-driven political economies and to build more equitable and balanced social ecologies. The second is to support diverse voices, knowledges, and practices as vital resources for strengthening degrowth thought and action. And the third is to unlearn conventional politics of knowledge and action, while generating new understandings and applications through feminist epistemological interventions. All are advanced through alliances including postcolonial, indigenous, and intersectional efforts. Degrowth movements will benefit from placing those strategies at the core of studies and policies oriented to forging futures that are not only environmentally sound, but also thriving and inclusive. Feminist analyses illuminate hierarchical sociocultural systems and narratives that divide and polarize potential allies, heighten awareness of relative positioning and power within these systems, and contextualize diverse pathways and perspectives. FaDA promotes strategic alliances that explicitly recognize the class, gender, colonial, and ethno-racial systems that categorize people into unequal relationships, and care-fully attend to ways in which these systems constrain and contaminate attempts at alliance-building. These contributions can be multiplied via tangible degrowth-wide support for learning from these Degrowth Journal Volume 1 (2023) 00046 histories, and for feminist movement building, especially regarding the coordination of local struggles transnationally. Degrowth advocates agree that transformation towards worlds that prioritize good living for all will require us to find points of convergence and to activate synergies among diverse positions and purposes; feminist degrowth activism and scholarships have prepared this ground. Building more explicit and fruitful alliances requires courageous moves to ally with diverse feminisms, and to create new narratives that portray “degrowth as if feminists and feminism mattered” (Gregoratti & Raphael, 2019, p. 85). By providing systematic space to develop synergies and alliances discussed here, and by inviting feminist-informed contributions, Degrowth as a journal facilitates and fuels this process.

3 While the dearth of race-based data from state civil courts has made it difficult to construct a full picture, existing data show that racialized individuals and communities are impacted disproportionately by civil justice issues. 2 Racialized litigants are less likely to have access to critical resources and more likely to receive negative results. And, as in all systems, the ability to access justice in the civil legal system is influenced by multiple factors, including societal discrimination, economic inequality, and race- based behaviors of individual system actors. 4 The civil court system is characterized by racial disparities in access, treatment, and outcomes, all of which deserve increased attention. At the same time, we view the observation of these disparities as the beginning of a larger and sustained inquiry about how and why such disparities exist. Racial disparities in the civil courts serve as a miner's canary-an invitation to further question the role that race plays in the design, structure, and operation of the civil court system. The responses to that inquiry are critical not only to our understanding of how race affects the administration of civil justice, but also as part of a necessary foundation for contemplating systemic change. 5 This Essay contributes to the above conversation-and offers one possible response to the above inquiry-by exploring how civil courts, as an arm of the state, function as sites of racial capitalism. It argues that theories of racial capitalism help to explain how and why state civil courts are designed and operate to subordinate racialized groups and individuals. In doing so, it also makes an important contribution to the growing racial capitalism literature by expanding its application in legal scholarship. This Essay strengthens the existing literature by examining the racial capitalism conceptual framework in state civil courts, a site commonly understood as nonmarket. More broadly, it advances still nascent conversations about race and access to civil justice that require not only more empirical data on racial demographics but also more theoretical analysis of the social significance of race. 6 8 Racial capitalism is a relatively new concept in legal academia and has its roots in several other disciplines, including Black studies, history, political science, sociology, and cultural studies, where the term has been defined and used differently by a wide range of scholars. 7 While critical race theorists have demonstrated that race is fundamental to and deeply embedded in U.S. law, scholars of racial capitalism have emphasized how racial subordination is fundamental, rather than incidental, to economic exploitation. From a legal perspective, racial capitalism can be understood as a system of racialized "dispossession, extraction, accumulation, and exploitation" for power and profit in which human elements are both commodified and devalued. 10 We argue that through their interpretation and implementation of the law and the processes they impose, the civil courts function as instruments of racial capitalism, facilitating its goals and assisting in its entrenchment. 9 11 Civil cases are typically framed as voluntary disputes among private parties, yet many racially and economically marginalized litigants, particularly Black individuals, enter the civil legal system involuntarily, often in a defensive or vulnerable posture. Even in cases where marginalized plaintiffs initiate litigation, they enter the civil courts due to a lack of other feasible options. They are forced to subject themselves and others to a system designed to devalue them, commodify their needs, and maximize financial extraction. Most of the cases in the civil system involve eviction, debt collection, or family law matters -legal matters likely to target poor and racialized litigants. And in many of those cases, an individual has been sued by the state or a corporation. 14 It is those cases that are the focus of this Essay, where the ability of the party initiating court action to extract capital and exercise control over racialized people is strongest. And it is in these cases that the role of the courts in facilitating the transfer and accumulation of assets from racialized individuals to majority-white corporations or the state itself is most visible. 12 13 16 15 Courts have long played a role in defining race and policing racial order, contributing to the perpetuation of racial inequality and, more specifically, white dominance. The civil courts that are the focus of this Essay are very much a part of that story. They oversee and process case dockets filled by poor people and, as limited available data have shown, disproportionately Black people. In addition, the racialization of poverty in U.S. society has made it impossible to disentangle narratives of the "undeserving poor" from those of Black America. 17 This entwinement of racial and economic status-and the imposition of beliefs and traits suggesting that these individuals are appropriate subjects for state-sponsored discipline -is operationalized through the work of civil courts and provides additional justification for the extraction that racial capitalism requires. 18

Auctions versus gifts Would auctioning permits solve this problem? Although there has not been a substantial experiment in the full auctioning of pollution permits it has been widely proposed. Policy in the EU also seems to be moving in this direction. Under Phase II of the EU ETS, which began in January 2008, a (very small) proportion of permits have been auctioned.37 Under Phase III, which begins in 2013, the European Commission estimates that 60 per cent of permits will be auctioned.38 The Australian government has, however, rejected the recommendation of its own Garnaut Review to fully auction permits, and instead proposes to hand-out around 40 per cent of permits to industry for free.39 If permits are auctioned under an ETS, polluters would at least be denied the windfall profits outlined above. As long as the market for permits functions competitively (which it may not), emissions trading with fully auctioned permits does put a real cost on pollution, and not simply an opportunity cost. This means that the state captures the revenue from this new commodity, and not polluters. However, we should not conclude that this represents an unambiguous victory against the interests of polluters in particular, and capital in general. Since auctioning permits makes no difference to the opportunity cost of pollution, it follows that it will have the same consequences for the prices of emissions intensive goods and services.40 Whether the overall effect is regressive depends upon how the state spends the additional revenue it raises. Under a ‘cap and share’ scheme, the money would be distributed on an equal basis to each citizen (with each having the option to ‘spend’ this dividend on retiring permits).41 Peter Barnes bases his advocacy for such a scheme on what he sees as the unfortunate but necessary recognition that environmental ‘goods’ can only be preserved if they are priced and commodified.42 He argues that if the Earth’s carbon cycling capacity can be said to belong to anyone, it must belong to everyone: hence the need to share the revenue from emissions trading equally. In his book Heat, George Monbiot argued for a scheme which would have a similar effect, combining state-auctioned permits for industry with an equal allocation of tradeable carbon ‘rations’ for consumers. Such proposals avoid the kinds of problems outlined so far. In theory they would have a progressive effect on the distribution of income, since, in absolute terms, the poor consume fewer emissions intensive resources than the rich, but both would receive the same dividend or allocation of rations. There are still important problems with ‘cap and share’ type proposals. They theoretically provide lower income households with a carbon dividend which on average would cover the costs of increased prices, but there is still a strong case that these price increases themselves are objectionable. Imagine a pensioner who is barely scraping by switching off their heating in winter so that they can spend their carbon dividend on food and petrol. Think also of someone on a low income who needs to travel long distances and has no access to public transport: the carbon dividend may well not cover their increased transport costs. Moreover, it is not hard to imagine a situation in which politicians or bosses cynically justify cuts in welfare payments or wages by pointing out that the carbon dividend has made lower income households ‘better off’. The ETS outlined in the Australian government’s White Paper would be significantly worse than ‘cap and share’. Unsurprisingly, the White Paper makes no reference to the Earth’s natural systems as a form of common property. Instead, it commits only to using some of the revenue raised by the proposed ETS for the purposes of compensating households for price increases.44 Indeed, there are reasons to suspect that even this commitment will not be maintained over the long term. If the carbon price increases significantly, compensation payments will also need to rise substantially for lower income households not to be left worse off. The scheme proposed in the White Paper would effectively make the carbon dump just another commodity that consumers must pay to access. Auctioning permits combined with compensation is certainly no guarantee that the poor and working class will not be made to pay for the costs of whatever cuts in pollution an ETS does manage to achieve. From a political economy perspective, this redistributive aspect of emissions trading is surely a crucial one. It suggests that one goal lying behind the current trend towards adopting trading schemes is to shore up the profitability of capital at the expense of labour. Indeed, the Treasury’s own modelling reveals that under an emissions trading scheme, ‘labour income growth slows more than capital income’.45 Interestingly, while Matthews and Paterson ignore this possibility, it actually supports their overall conclusion that states are pursuing emissions trading as part of their role in promoting capital accumulation. Indeed, it is also possible to combine the analysis of the distributional consequences of an ETS with their original insight that emissions trading promotes the dynamic process of capital accumulation within a more consistent Marxist framework. However, it is first necessary to examine in more detail how Marx explains the relationship between the environment and capital accumulation.