Appears in Capitalism Nature Socialism 34:1
Bad Leftist: An Introduction to Leigh Brownhill
I am a bad Leftist. I am an under-employed contingent academic labourer at an online university (Athabasca U); but I love my job and my school does some cool things, like periodically offering free massive open online courses. I volunteer at my union Local, not to wait for “the Great Leap Forward,” but rather to prepare for and participate in the democratic practice of people-led power, within my small sphere of activity and impact. I am at times out of place – neither anti-state enough for anarchists, nor economically-determinist enough for orthodox Marxists.
I grew up in one of the poor branches of a long-time white settler New England family. My parents’ divorce in the 1970s meant I experienced what millions of children of divorce endure, that is, a precipitous drop in household income and, for us, the stigma of poverty in an otherwise relatively well-off oceanside town. Impacted by the prejudices around me, I developed a keen radar for and stance against discrimination and a very early fellow-feeling for other poor people. In 1982, in a torturous “game” of Russian roulette played with a stolen gun, a likely-mentally ill juvenile shot dead a beloved relative of mine at age 15. I mourned and have since acted to join campaigns for the release of juvenile lifers. I campaign for the abolition of prisons, police, and the military industrial complex(es). I march for gun control and against war. I am a survivor and an activist against rape and violence against women. While steeped experientially in contexts that led me to these political and philosophical positions, my biography also shapes my interactions with history – both the history being made in movements of which I have been a part (like the anti-Apartheid movement of the 1980s and Extinction Rebellion of the 2020s), as well as the history rooting all current struggles in their specific socio-cultural and geo-political pasts.
I am an unorthodox marxist; lower-case “m.” My marxism is rooted in exposure (as a teenager and ever since) to the persuasive and radical works of Trinidadian Marxist, CLR James; “persuasive and radical” to me because of his Pan-African, feminist, ‘from below’ perspective, as might be pithily read in one of his titles, “Every Cook Can Govern.” While an undergraduate student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, studying James and others, I learned about the history and power of alliances to challenge and change unjust laws and to topple empires. I arranged an Independent Study and spent a self-guided semester in Kenya looking deeply into colonial and post-colonial realities, to see with my own eyes something of the global web of the political economy of capitalism: how it exploits as well as how it inadvertently but inexorably puts diverse people in touch and in unity with each other against that exploitation. Doing so, I put myself on a path of lifelong relationships of solidarity and scholarship of struggle, which has very significantly shaped the particular arc of my life, activism, and analytical framework.
In my graduate studies at University of Guelph and University of Toronto, I took further a Jamesian line of inquiry to examine the ways that those among the “most exploited” – Kenyan peasant women under colonial rule – organised and built alliances to resist and overcome British colonialism and, furthermore, to carry those lessons forward into 21st century movements against political imprisonment, neo-liberal enclosures, and corporate globalisation. I spent dusty days in archives, but most fruitfully, undertook oral history methodologies with elderly women and men to hear the history first hand from those who experienced it. This deepened my understanding of and commitment to the transformational power of subsistence-oriented political economies and cultures.
I don’t join parties, even socialist or communist ones. I don’t believe the party should lead the masses, but rather that the commoners of the world should lead the parties. Moreover, I recognise that fenceline communities of colour and other often-invisible ordinary activists have already shaped the very development of ecofeminist ecosocialist thinking and movements for decades. For one, peoples of the Global South (in both movements and in communities) maintain and innovate the widest array of commoning practices, based on diverse and deeply-rooted social relations of collectivity. From a CLR Jamesian perspective, one that looks for the future in the present, the collective capacities of commoning are already-existing powers that prefigure a future of free, equal, accountable social relations that are necessary for the creation of just, participatory, democratic, subsistence-oriented political economies for all. These commoning capacities are most fully elaborated by peasants, Indigenous, and dispossessed urban poor who maintain vibrant (or re-emergent) pre- and anti-colonial networks and social relations of cooperation that are vital to the practical, concrete elaboration of the alternative ecocentric economies and societies that are also the focus and raison d’être of CNS.
I do not see the commons as a tragedy. My research, teaching, writing, and activism focus on movements for the re-invention of the commons. “Re-invention” here means overcoming the impediments to, and building up the human capacities for, the collective flourishing of the species, of all life on Earth, and of the Earth itself. This also means the re-invention of the social relations of collectivity. Not a kneejerk “return to the past,” but an overturning of past inequalities and injustices of all kinds, and alignment with a re-reckoning of property relations and a banishment of deprivation by the arrangement of the sharing of the Earthly commons. My theoretical lenses have been honed by the observation of and participation in diverse politics and movements against capitalism and for food and energy sovereignty.
I can’t see any effective or humane politics on the right or left that centralise the rugged individual. I stand for the common good. Yet some elements of the left have followed the right in European and North American societies in their entrenched anti-communism, especially since 1950, that has included a distinct history of denigration and planned extinguishment of subsistence-oriented political economies and cultures of the Global South. This has taken place, through colonialism and since, in spaces outside the Imperial metropoles after the early capitalists had already significantly enclosed the commons in their own countries, expelled the commoners, broken up pre-capitalist economies and cultures, and concentrated wealth through this primitive accumulation to launch the capitalist class and global political economy we know today.
While the right still maintains the view that collectivity is backwardness and that individualism and nuclear family units are the only legitimate manifestations of freedom; too many on the left (especially the establishment Liberal and official Left parties) also dismiss the power of the collectivity of Indigenous and peasant commoning. Some leftists may do so in favour of a partisan vision of advanced cadres of trained Marxists (or Anarchists, or other leaders) mobilising the industrial working class to lead the rest of the world into a revolutionary, post-capitalist future.
I am for the self-mobilisation of the industrial working class in their struggle against exploitation. But I will also insist, from my editorial soapbox, that the world needs their power (and democratic control over means of industrial production) as much as we need the deeply-rooted, time-tested, transformational capacities of commoning (and democratic control over the means of all other production). As already argued, these capacities are most fully elaborated by the women, peasants, and people of colour who are more directly linked to pre-capitalist lifeways and engaged in emerging post-capitalist commoning relations, innovations, and livelihood practices.
As such, the “unit of analysis” within my analytical perspective and politics is not “identity,” as a diverse but ultimately individualistic characteristic; but rather, “gendered ethnicized class relations.” This focus encompasses the class struggle between the gendered ethnicised class relations of capitalism, of resistance to capitalism, and of alternative (pre- and post-capitalist) political economies. Capitalism (via imperialism, colonialism, neo-liberalism, and corporate globalisation) imposes gendered ethnicised class relations of division and hierarchy, and makes “male deals,” like Indirect Rule, that facilitate the extraction of profits from land and labour. But in true dialectical fashion, we can also turn this analytical lens to the gendered ethnicised class relations of unity forged by people who resist colonial and neo-liberal enclosures and hierarchies. These relations include the “gendered ethnicized class alliances” that unite groups across difference and distance, to advance a single “No” to neoliberalism, in favour of the collective liberation of people, both from particular injustices and from the yoke of class relations altogether. That brings us to another “moment” of class struggle – the many “Yesses” – the decolonised relations of commoning, that characterise the alternative political economies capable of supporting all peoples, all sectors, and all life needs. That is, the “After part;” both the vision of the ecofeminist ecosocialism we aspire to, and the examination of where in the present this future can already be seen. This includes the prefiguration to be witnessed in community-based initiatives in most countries, and, as we in this journal contend, what is aspired to everywhere, for a post-fossil fuel future political economy beyond capitalism.
These brief reflections are offered so that reader may know something about me and the analytical lenses that I wear, as one of the journal’s two new Co-Editors in Chief (with Daniel Faber). With this background and perspective, and within the current conjuncture of biophysical, political, and ecological crises facing humanity, I plan to watch for and seek out journal content that analyzes and elevates people’s actions to practice more democracy (e.g., at workplaces in unionisation, in the sciences, in every realm) and to increase capacities for global alliances and solidarity to overcome the social and ecological depredations of capitalism.
I am honoured to be able to carry forward the good work this journal has been doing for decades, in these and other regards, under the respective able editorships of James O’Connor, Joel Kovel, and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro. Joel was an especially early proponent of the view that ecosocialism was not complete without ecofeminism. I like to add, in turn, that the ecofeminisms that have shaped this journal’s particular contributions to ecosocialism are of the historical-materialist and anti-capitalist kind.
With Danny and the entire editorial board, we are committed to further extending the journal’s anti-racism and anti-war themes, reintroducing interviews and multi-media reviews, and doing more podcasts. For me, I plan to keep using an ecosocialist ecofeminist lens to analyze current conflicts, such as the unconscionable war against trans and gender non-binary people, that is part of capital’s class war against humanity and the rest of nature. I will take this up in CNS’s pages later this year. In the meantime, please join us, or carry on as usual, as readers, reviewers, and contributors, in the worthy pursuit of the extension of old and elaboration of new ecofeminist ecosocialist thought, analysis, and actual alternatives.
Leigh Brownhill
At the Intersection of Socialist Ecology and Environmental Justice: An Introduction to Daniel Faber
It was some thirty-five years ago when the co-founders of Capitalism, Nature, Socialism (CNS) came together in my living room in Santa Cruz, California for our first “official” meeting. The inspiration for this gathering came out of a graduate seminar given by James O’Connor in the Fall of 1988 at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I was a Ph.D. graduate in the seminar at the time. The meeting brought together a dozen or so aspiring and accomplished scholars, scientists, and activists from San Francisco, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, and Nicaragua to discuss the launching of a new journal devoted to socialist ecology. The response to the proposal was overwhelmingly positive, and our very first issue would appear later that year.
As Left ecologists, we wanted to elevate the worldwide struggles against the biological exploitation of peasants, workers, women, and Indigenous peoples by capital to their rightful place alongside traditional struggles against the economic exploitation of the working class. As stated by O’Connor in the Prospectus of that very first issue, “We submit that the conjuncture of social and ecological struggles is a … profound historical fact which requires a massive rethinking of what Rudi Deutsche once called left-wing ‘time-honored’ and ‘time-worn’ political formulae and slogans.” We immediately took up this task. Our goal was to create a vehicle for people all over the world to explore the ecological crisis of global capitalism from a non-sectarian Left theoretical framework. I have been traveling on this journey ever since. I am now honoured to assume the reins of the journal as Co-Editor in Chief with my colleague, Leigh Brownhill. This is an intimidating task. In the personas of former CNS Editors-in-Chief James O’Connor, Joel Kovel, and most recently Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, the journal has enjoyed brilliant leadership. We hope to do justice to the depth of thought, passion, and intellectual clarity they brought to the journal.
I grew up in Tennessee in the 1960s, and Kentucky in the 1970s, as part of a very political household. As a champion for civil rights in education policy, my father served as a consultant in many of the most contentious school desegregation cases in the United States. I became aware at a very young age of the racist threats commonly endured by my father and the family. Coming of age, I experienced alienating and dangerous working conditions as a meat cutter, and later a cook, at the hands of a restaurant owner straight out of a Charles Dickens novel. These collective experiences filled me with outrage and indignation, and spurred me to become an activist. Inspired by my father’s commitment to racial justice, my two sisters and I became activists. We worked with small family farmers in Kentucky for food justice, and with the rural poor of Appalachia for economic justice. We took up the cause of educational and environmental justice in Little Village and the South Side of Chicago (where I was born). We rallied for the end of apartheid in South Africa, for the protection of battered women, and became part of the solidarity movement with the people of Central America in opposition to U.S. military intervention. We began to see the many forms by which injustice so assiduously took root. I learned to make the connections between the oppression and exploitation of people in the global South and the southern United States, especially in Appalachia and Central America. It was those sensibilities that led me to pursue my Ph.D. in Santa Cruz in the 1980s.
These personal experiences also influenced my scholarly work, particularly in terms of adopting an eco-socialist theoretical perspective that saw embracing the intersectionality of our global struggles as fundamental to understanding the politics of power. Such an intersectional view is crucial because social and political action against environmental destruction can be effective only when guided by more comprehensive prescriptions that take into account the interconnections between class exploitation, racial and gender oppression, imperialism, political domination, and ecological crises. Since my formative experiences as an activist, I have sought to develop and integrate a radical environmental justice (EJ) perspective into my work. As a devout Gramscian, I have also endeavoured to make my counter-hegemonic scholarship relevant and accessible to movement activists, scholars, scientists, and even the government. It is in this same spirit that I will strive to make the journal more politically impactful and accessible to a broader audience of academics and activists alike.
Each of us are drawn throughout our lives towards struggles that keep us up at night, motivate our days, and give a sense of purpose and direction to our work – scholarly or otherwise. The four areas of interest below have been that for me. Although these issues and their expressions have changed over time, as has my understanding of them, they are no less pertinent today than they were decades ago when I first encountered them.
Social and Environmental Injustice: Class, Race, Gender, and Nationality
The notion that “not all people are polluted equal” is a central concern in my ongoing research. In recent years, a growing number of studies have documented the disproportionate exposure of the working class and people of color to environmental harm. In my own work, I developed a methodology for evaluating the existence of such class-based and racial disparities. Fueled in some part by the publicity generated by my work, an environmental justice policy was adopted by the Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs (EOEA). Still, my research differed from most others in that it also emphasised the need for a more transformative EJ politics. In my view, policy attempts to rectify inequities in the distribution of environmental harm without transforming the fundamental processes of capitalist production that create such harm in the first place are largely focused on symptoms rather than causes. As such, such an approach can only offer partial, temporary, and necessarily incomplete solutions.
Informed by an eco-socialist politics, a more transformative EJ politics would promote social ownership and long-term democratic planning aimed at meeting the human and environmental needs of all present and future generations. This would include adopting pollution prevention measures which eliminate the use of dangerous chemicals, production processes, and consumer goods altogether (source reduction), rather than relying on costly and ineffective pollution control measures aimed at “containing” and “fairly” distributing environmental hazards once they are produced. In this respect, democratic eco-socialism is not only a form of praxis (practice), but must also become the telos (purpose) of movements for environmental justice.
An eco-Marxist perspective is also crucial to moving the rapidly evolving theoretical and political discussions around intersectionality currently taking place in the movement and academic circles in a more radical direction. If EJ intersectionality theorists conceive of a system of distinct power relations revolving around class exploitation, racism, and patriarchy as similarly equivalent and interchangeable, then their proposed political outcomes could prove counter-productive. Instead, neo-Marxist, ecofeminism, and eco-socialist theory can help demonstrate how class exploitation, racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression are mutually constructed and reinforcing under contemporary forms of neo-liberal, racial capitalism. Analyses that otherwise fail to make these links between environmental injustices, racism, nativism, neo-colonialism, heteropatriarchy and ageism to the relevant hegemonic systems of class exploitation will not enable a truly transformative politics. This is one of the many tasks awaiting the journal as we move forward.
Foundations and the Politics of Social Movements
Another area of my work revolves around radical philanthropy. While there is no doubt that many foundations have made valuable contributions to the betterment of societies around the globe, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the world’s growing ecological problems reflect a crisis in liberal philanthropy. Even though socialists understand that socioeconomic, ecological, and political problems are deeply interrelated in a capitalist society, most of the foundation world still functions in a way that fails to reflect this complexity and connectedness. As a result, the linkages between global capitalism, neo-liberalism, imperialism, environmental abuses, poverty and economic inequality, racism, and the lack of democracy are typically ignored and/or under-theorised. Instead, the traditional foundation community responds with more charity, or encourages special projects that emphasise the role of non-profit organisations and/or neo-liberal market-based incentives as the means for providing needed services, enhancing “community assets,” rebuilding “social capital”, and solving pressing social problems.
My research on philanthropy is concerned with understanding the important role foundations can play in reinvigorating Left-oriented social movements, particularly the EJ movement. A dirty little secret is that most social movements in the advanced capitalist countries are deeply dependent upon foundations for their financial support. As a result, grantmakers can exert tremendous influence on the political agendas of their grantees. Originating from storehouses of corporate power and wealth, liberal foundations often promote approaches anti-thetical to worker empowerment and community organising. In recent years, however, an increasing number of foundations and funder networks have adopted an explicitly anti-capitalist perspective. As a result, money is now being redistributed to social movements trying to address the current social and ecological contradictions of global capitalism. I have been particularly interested in new models of philanthropic activism where foundations attempt to confront such contradictions. Philanthropic activism is a process whereby grantmakers go beyond the traditional role of dispersing funds to undertake additional actions and that further the mission of the foundation and Left/progressive social movements. There is a growing recognition that a foundation’s institutional clout provides environmental funders with the ability, as well as the obligation, to support struggles for more radical forms of environmental activism beyond the awarding of grants.
Globalisation, Ecological Imperialism, and Transnational Social Movements
As international trade is under the control of largely Northern-based transnational capital, both the natural resource wealth found in imports of energy and raw materials into the global North are in much greater proportion than the monetary (abstract) wealth that is exported back to the global South. Through exploitative world trade relations, the global North is increasingly appropriating the biocapacity of the global South. This process also includes the damage being done to the economies of the global South resulting from exports of pollution, hazardous waste, greenhouse gases, and other ecological hazards (externalities).
My research on globalisation and environmental injustice is concerned with the way trade policy create ecological and social problems in the global South vis-a-vis the export of environmental hazards (or externalities). This impact occurs through foreign direct investment in environmentally damaging industries and the relocation of Northern-based dirty facilities to the global South, as well as from the dumping of toxic waste and dangerous consumer goods in developing countries and the widespread exploitation of land and labour. In addition to the export of hazard, I also examine the way neo-liberal economic policies facilitate the confiscation of greater quantities of biomass from the South at prices highly advantageous to global capital. Deconstructing this process of global unequal exchange is of fundamental concern to the journal.
Much of my inspiration for working on globalisation and ecological imperialism is drawn from my experiences in Central America. In 1983, I co-founded the Environmental Project On Central America. EPOCA worked to link issues of human rights, poverty, and sustainable development by addressing the human and ecological impacts of U.S. policy in the region. We were also committed to supporting the adoption of revolutionary ecology in Nicaragua after the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship. During this time, EPOCA organised: (1) a regional network of Central American environmentalists (REDES) for the purpose of coordinating research efforts and policy proposals; (2) regional and international environmental justice conferences, such as the 1989 Congress on the Fate and Hope of the Earth held in Managua, which included over 1,200 participants from over 70 nations; and (3) international support for a number of popular-led “leader” environmental justice projects and programs throughout the region, including Campesino to Campesino in Nicaragua. During the early 1990s, I authored numerous publications on imperialism and environmental injustice in Central America, including Environment Under Fire (with Monthly Review Press).
Climate Justice, the Polluter-Industrial Complex, and Global Capitalism:Toward a More Transformative Environmental Politics
Most recently, I have dedicated myself to advancing a more transformative and emancipatory climate justice politics. Solutions to the climate crisis are inseparable from the resolution of other major social injustices. If exploitive power relations are the root cause of ecological crises, deep structural reforms and systemic changes to these power relations are required to create a more just and sustainable future for all. I am therefore particularly motivated to help create an inspirational vision of how the climate crisis can serve as a catalyst for creating a new type of post-capitalist society that truly meets the needs of both people and the planet.
To this end, I recently co-founded the Global Center for Climate Justice, which is engaged in popular education, network building, and activism around transformative solutions to the climate crisis. The Center will partner with the journal from time to time around specific projects. Both are housed under the Center for Political Ecology in Santa Cruz. Like CNS, the Center is devoted to exploring the relationship between climate change and social justice in the context of both mitigation and adaptation policies. Its mission is to expose the root causes of the climate crisis as grounded in corporate power structures (particularly the polluter-industrial complex), neo-liberalism and the assault on democracy, imperialism, and global capitalism.
As the new Co-Editor of Chief, it is my intention to see that Capitalism, Nature, Socialism continues to develop as a critically important resource for advancing a democratic, ecosocialist politics. In the coming years, our online resources and connections will be crucial to this effort. CNSWeb expands the aim of the print version of the journal in establishing an online community of red-green activists and scholars. Like the print form of CNS, CNSWeb encompasses anti-capitalist perspectives that are both egalitarian and environmental in orientation. CNSWeb also serves as a platform for intellectuals who may be outside or at the margins of academic institutions. It is a forum for encouraging and facilitating critical debates on timely issues of environment and radical politics – feminist, anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-imperialist. We believe that these debates are essential for mobilising effective political action. Leigh and I intend to broaden CNSWeb’s reach and impact with your support and engagement.
Thanks to CNSWeb and the work of our many editors, writers, and staff, the influence of the journal is expanding. We are now more essential than ever. I hope you will join us in contributing to the collective effort that is this journal.
Daniel Faber