Cross-posting from Terrestri(e)alism. These cross-posts will end, so please subscribe there if you want to make sure you won’t miss any.
No, taking over Venezuela is neither about democracy nor about drugs. It’s about four closely related things:
- oil, which means maintaining the fossil-fuel industrialism that is running the world into the ground;
- power, specifically the continuing anti-constitutional takeover of the United States, which requires something new every day to prevent opposition from consolidating;
- distraction, specifically, from the Epstein files and Trump’s plummeting approval ratings; and
- geopolitics, specifically, the neo-imperialistic carve-up of the world between authoritarian power blocs (at least three of them, with one, China, now being pushed aside from Venezuela).
This is the new world order, which is the final flaring up of fossil-fuel imperialism. Opposition to it will have to be bottom-up, anti-imperialist, and thoroughly ecological.
The way to think about this reconfiguration of the world is as a new class antagonism. (I present this idea in the introductory chapter of Terra Invicta and am developing it further in a forthcoming publication.)
We could identify a historical series of “class antagonisms” over the last 500 years: between colonizers and colonized groups, between landowners and serfs, between owners of capital and proletarianized workers, and between metropolitan elites and diverse subaltern populations. All of these have been made complex by internal divisions and cross-cutting filiations, including the emergence of “middle classes” as well as diverse international coalitions and alliances. Democracy has, in its different forms, largely (if not always) worked to mediate and mitigate these antagonisms, though also in uneven ways.
As authors like Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz, Matthew Huber, Razmig Keucheyan, and Andreas Malm have variously argued, the globalization of climate change impacts comes marked by an emerging “new class antagonism.” There is not yet any consensus on the constitution of these classes, which are hardly self-aware as such. But they are the best way to read current conflicts so as to guide our actions toward a better alternative.
Huber, for instance, pits an ecological “working class,” the class of those “alienated from nature and forced to survive via the market,” against a seemingly insurmountable enemy he calls (citing Malm) “fossil capital.” He defines the latter as including a long list of “forms of capital that generate profit through emissions” — “extractive capital,” “industrial capital,” “electricity capital,” “green capital” (including “renewable energy developers, carbon-offset swindlers, and an emergent field of innovation based on carbon removal [… and] geoengineering”), “finance capital,” the “rentier class,” petroleum-exporting “landlord states,” the “middle class” of “managers, supervisors, and other infantry enforcing the rule of capital,” alongside “petty-bourgeosie” small business owners and others. How the alienated global working class is to come to class consciousness is a question Huber leaves untheorized.
Latour and Schultz, on the other hand, define the “ecological class” so expansively as to be almost everyone: the “proletariat in the production of wealth,” the women whose role in that production has long been unacknowledged, the colonized who have been subjected to “unfair trading” for centuries, “the living beings and the Earth system” whose role as “wealth producers” the ecological crisis makes unassailable, indigenous peoples, “the next generations,” “large swathes of the intellectual classes” including Earth scientists and the “engineers and inventors, whose desire for innovation has been shattered by the narrow constraints of production,” “all the activists, militants, people of good will, ordinary citizens, peasants, gardeners, industrialists, investors, explorers in one capacity or other, not to mention all those who’ve seen their territory disappear before their very eyes,” and even “the religions” who “represent huge forces and deep emotions that have already managed, over the course of the centuries, to transform souls, landscapes, the law, the arts,” and who include “all those who work, rite after rite, to make sure that the ‘cry of the Earth and the Poor’ — to take up the beautiful expression (or, rather, cry!) of Pope Francis — is finally heard.”
The difference between these two variations of an “ecological class antagonism” is not only a difference in who belongs and who is welcomed, but also in what the struggle is over: is it over “ownership and control of production,” as Huber would have it, or something altogether more ontological, involving the “forces of reproduction” or “engenderment,” to use Latour and Schultz’s term, but also identity and affiliation with place — the “earthbound” who have either attached themselves to the maintenance of specific places or have never managed to detach themselves in the first place?
To propose identifiable names to this “emerging antagonism,” I suggest that it pits a climate precariat, whose vulnerability to climate change renders it hardly able to protect itself from climate-related eco-trauma, against a fossil-fuel protectorate, which, while divided in other respects, works together to protect its interests at others’ expense. The two are defined less by their economic position than by their relative vulnerability and, relatedly, by their capacity (or lack of it) to shield themselves from the impacts of climate change through continued investment in the fossil-fuel energy regime.
Forming a triangle with these two is a nascent third force, a kind of “attractor” that exercises an increasing pull on both, which I call an energy transitionate. The third force could ultimately take the form of a “green capitalist” alliance or a “green social-democratic” alliance, or more likely something with elements of both in an uneasy truce that would, at its best, harbor the potential of a global “Green New Deal” reminiscent of the New Deal that defined U.S. politics in the two and a half decades after the end of World War Two, which are sometimes considered the “golden age” of liberal capitalism. It wasn’t utopia then, and neither can we look forward to utopia anytime soon. But it was a workable compromise between industry, labor, and the state that not only generated but spread wealth for millions.
This tripartite division is heuristic and theoretical; it hardly captures what is occurring in real-world relations between, say, the United States, Europe, China, Russia, and other nations or blocs. Yet sociopolitical and ecological conflicts around the world, in the interests and perceptions that shape them, might be read as marked by this antagonism and its third “attractor.” Defining what might be a possible compromise for a future of precarious earthly regeneration is the task of our time.
Every global conflict today bears the marks of this ecological class antagonism. I make that case about the Russo-Ukrainian war in that introduction to Terra Invicta. Briefly, it’s that the war is environmental not only in the targeting of environments, energy grids, and nuclear power plants, but in that its causes are ecopolitical. Russia is a declining petro-state and Ukraine’s role as its gas pipeline go-between and industrial support is significant. Add to that the libidinally powerful pseudo-history that Putin obsesses over — in which Kyïv is the “mother of Russian cities” and Ukraine by definition his imperial cradle — and you have the psychologically potent mix of eco-irrationalism that feeds the Putinist ideology.
The U.S. under Trump is fully on board with Putin’s fossil-fuel interests (less so his Slavo-historical obsessions), and taking Venezuela is entirely consistent with its own fossil-fuel imperialism. Whether Cuba or Greenland will be next, the same set of interests obtains. And if it’s Taiwan that is next in the ring of imperial dominoes, we might not have oil to blame, but history and semiconductors will both be part of the picture.
The task for those of us who want to see a better, more sustainable, regenerative, and just world, is to continue working from the ground up to make that world possible, and to communicate the vision of it as clearly as we can. Our work is cut out for us.
(“Class triangle” image updated to be more viewer-friendly.)