Afterword: extinguishing the flames: a call for future research and action on far-right ecologies

The Zetkin Collective (contributing authors, in alphabetical order: William Callison, George Edwards, Ståle Holgersen, Alexandra McFadden, Jacob McLean and Tatjana Söding)

As the world burns, the far right worships at the flaming altar of fossil capital. Whether through denial, deflection or delay, their goal is not to alleviate but to accelerate the climate and biodiversity crisis. Our goal – the goal of all who refuse this collective death drive and who fight for a habitable planet – is to understand and extinguish these flames before it is too late.

When the Zetkin Collective published White Skin, Black Fuel back in 2021, the political ecologies of the far right still comprised a field of research in the making. A few years later, with this volume and an increasing number of scholarly publications, it is clearly becoming a well-established field. While our book mainly focused on the Global North, Political Ecologies of the Far Right has shown that the phenomenon is (unfortunately) not only alive but thriving far beyond countries in the capitalist core. The volume has surveyed the thematic and geographical diversity of far-right political ecology: from agricultural ethno-nationalism in South Africa to reactionary militants benefiting from global warming conspiracies in Nigeria; from eco-fascism in Aotearoa New Zealand to anti-environmentalism in Brazil; from Christian nationalism and idealized masculinity to new far-right communication strategies in Europe and North America; and the unclear lines between denialists and climate delayers around the globe.

Broadening the geographical scale of the political ecologies of the far right – as Political Ecologies of the Far Right does – is a crucial step forward. But more chapters, cases and volumes must be written. Many such studies would need to account for the geopolitical reconfiguration that has occurred since February 2022, when the ultra-nationalist Vladimir Putin ordered the military invasion of Ukraine. Having long built the pipelines ensuring international dependency on Russian fossil fuels and the communication infrastructure connecting the international far right, the invasion kicked the politics of fossil fascism into a higher gear.

This new phase of far-right organization was not primarily the product of some Putinist master strategy, however. It was also the consequence of a fossil-hungry European establishment committed to business-as-usual with an increasingly authoritarian and murderous regime. ‘A cautious u-turn with regards to Russia’, as Oleksiy Radynski (2022) observed, ‘was only made by these elites when it became clear, in the early days of the invasion, that Ukrainian resistance had halted the Russian blitzkrieg.’ Meanwhile, the neo-colonial invasion was justified by appropriating the left's rhetoric of ‘anti-fascism’ and fabricating narratives about a ‘Nazi’ government in Kyiv (Bilous, 2023). Inside and outside Russia, the far right has violently mobilized against feminist, queer and trans politics in both word and deed. While some parts of the international right have pivoted away from supporting the Russian government, other parts have filled the vacuum, thereby ensuring that Russia's lines of finance, communication and influence continue to expand. The invasion is not just transforming the trajectory of international trade and energy policy. It is providing fuel for the fire of xenophobic, anti-environmental and anti-LGBTQ politics for decades to come.

As sanctions and sabotage made it harder to sell Russian oil and gas to Europe, exports flowed in other directions. From less than 1 per cent before February 2022, India imported about 35 per cent of its oil from Russia only a year later (Outlook India, 2023). Modi's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) emerged out of and remains intimate with the world's longest-running fascist group, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an all-male paramilitary organization which has been in operation for nearly a century. One fixation of the Hindu nationalist ideology is the restoration of an ‘unbroken India’, an imagined land of ‘cultural unity’ spreading from Afghanistan in the west to Myanmar in the east. Speaking of the advance of this Hindu nation, the chief of the RSS warned that a ‘vehicle is on the move which has an accelerator but no brakes … those who want to stop it will be either removed or finished, but India will not stop’ (Express News Service, 2023). Much of the fuel for the Indian engine flows through the Adani Group's many pipes. The industrial empire, formed of coal, oil, gas, airports, cement and shipping, stretches far beyond the Indian subcontinent, with one recent acquisition being Israel's largest port. But when an American hedge-fund shorted the company amid allegations of widespread fraud, the RSS came to Adani's defence. The principal magazine of the fascist organization recognized these to be attacks on the nation – analogous to those perpetrated by environmental activists, George Soros and the producers of a BBC documentary that defamed Modi – intended to slow down the country's economic rise (Mehta and Singh, 2023). The moving vehicle that is the Indian nation is defended by an aura of conspiratorial thinking.

Adani has also reached across the Indian Ocean to plug into another fossil empire – Australia. Adani's Carmichael mine, supported heavily by the Australian government and fossil industry, sits in the Galilee Basin in Queensland, an untouched region at the edge of the Great Barrier Reef. The colossal mine violates Indigenous ancestral land rights and is set to add 4.6 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere. Uncoincidentally, the state of Queensland houses some of the country's most prominent public climate deniers and fossil fuel advocates. This includes Frazer Anning, former Queensland Senator who blamed the Christchurch mosque attack on immigration and mocks any meek attempts by Australian politicians to address environmental crises. Another figure is Pauline Hanson, leader of the right-wing One Nation party, who infamously wore a burqa to Parliament to protest Muslim immigration, and regularly engages in anti-Aboriginal rhetoric and climate change conspiracies. After visiting the Great Barrier Reef following a heavy bleaching period in 2016, Hanson earned ridicule from marine conservationists when she put her head under the water and promptly declared that ‘it’ – a living structure larger than the United Kingdom – was in ‘pristine condition’.

Beneath this circus of climate apathy and white nationalism that belies Australia's fossil engine lies the ideology of civilizationism. This entails the belief that the superiority of white Europeans is embedded in ‘civilized’ technological capacities and the ‘civilized’ treatment and management of the environment, as ‘evidenced’ by historical feats over ‘uncivilized’ lands and peoples. ‘Civilizationism’ helps to draw together our understanding of the ethnic, racial and cultural boundaries of far-right ideology and ground them in specific historical-contemporary relations with technology and the environment. The most overt and vicious defenders of Australian civilizationism are far-right activist groups and online media platforms. Groups like Antipodean Resistance and the Lads Society have attempted to infiltrate mainstream political parties, while online platforms XYZ and The Unshackled campaigned semi-officially for Anning's 2019 federal election run. These fringe groups are a symptom and an echo of the fossil hegemony and white Eurocentrism that define Australian politics. The settler colonial project that founded Australia was a civilizationist project, and far-right actors are driven to protect and project these sentiments of white technological and ecological dominance (McFadden, 2023). Fossil extractivism is seen as a natural consequence of superior white technology, which entitles White Australia to an unchecked supply of ecological resources. The lands and cultures stamped down on this path are dismissed as vestiges of ‘uncivilized’ technologies and ways of managing lands and resources. Notably, far-right civilizationism aims to maintain Australia's fossil industry free from non-white foreign investment and control, including that of Adani, which is ironic given the anti-Muslim and civilizationist ideals the Australian far right shares with the BJP. In contrast, the mainstream liberal and labour parties prioritize filling their coffers as long as the national character and population base remain ‘white’ and ‘civilized’.

Major tectonic shifts are also occurring in the Middle East, with China taking a mediating role in a longstanding conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran in March 2023, thereby ensuring pipelines will allow oil to flow in its direction. Through OPEC+, these oil-producing countries still wield outsized and often disruptive influence over global prices in a period of high inflation, as seen in Saudi Arabia's decision to slash oil production for the rest of the year (Singh, 2023).

All the while Iran has been shaken by progressive political resistance from within its own borders. In the wake of the murder of 22-year-old Iranian Kurd Masha Jina Amini in September 2022, thousands of women took to the streets, setting their head scarfs aflame in tyre-rim pit fires or burning them on poles resembling firing flare guns. Though women are leading the protests and their struggle for ‘life and freedom’ is at the forefront of the movement, it has become a nation-wide, cross-class uprising supported by men and ethnic and political minorities alike. Shouting ‘Zan, Zendegi, Azadai’, a broad fraction of Iranian society is taking to the streets, risking their life over the struggle for the political, religious and personal freedom of the many. But the movement also has a climate dimension, as becomes evident in its anthem, ‘Baraye’ (For the Sake of), whose 28 lyrical lines dwell on the fights for the sake of which the Iranian population is rising. ‘For this polluted air; for the worn-out plane trees on Vali ‘Asr Street; for the cheetah and its possible extinction; for the innocent banned stray dogs’ are four lines indicating that the struggle against authoritarianism, poverty and repression is also a fight against environmental deterioration (Afary & Anderson, 2022). As much as the movement is building upon grievances and structures from previous feminist uprisings, it is likewise continuing the legacy of the protests against water shortages and food scarcity that shook the country in 2021 and 2022. With predictions of a 2.6°C rise in mean temperatures and a 35 per cent decline in precipitation in the next decades (Mansouri Daneshvar et al., 2019), Iran refuses to ratify the Paris Agreement despite being the eighth-biggest emitter in the world and acutely vulnerable to climate change.

One implication of the work collected in Political Ecologies of the Far Right is that the environmental struggle is linked with the anti-fascist struggle. And yet this link needs to be made more visible, both on the ground and in writing. Further research on far-right ecologies must specifically connect the fascist spectre with the growing literature on the socio-ecological transition. Current models for this transition – be they individualist or collectivist, techno-optimist or based on war-time mobilization – should be evaluated as to how they may serve or avert far-right crisis narratives. One crucial element of such an evaluation is questioning how political subjects are interpellated by the fossil capitalist system and which subject positions are offered by different narratives of a socio-ecologically just future. As the devastation wrought by climate change mounts and alternative ecological visions proliferate, how to conceptualize the forms of subjectivity that drive far-right political formations, without falling back on the rigid interpretations of fascism that have often characterized socialist theories? How can a materialist analysis simultaneously advance the imperative to transform economic production and illuminate the politics of identity, subjectivity and affect that are intertwined with this world-historic task? And how can anti-fascist, environmental, feminist, anti-racist and abolitionist struggles be connected on an international level? These questions may not be novel but, precisely because they remain open, engaged scholarship must put considerable effort into formulating new theories and tools.

Concretely, though, what does this mean for praxis? If the far right is ‘fanning the flames’ of climate change, then the challenge of extinguishing them is (at least) twofold: not only to obstruct primitive fossil capital itself, but to destroy the bellows that is the far right. Despite the growth in research on the political ecology of the far right, a remaining lacuna concerns the anti-fascist response to explicitly pro-fossil fuel far-right movements. If on a theoretical level we can say that fossil fuel expansion today materially produces the conditions for a fascistic politics and even climate genocide, then, on the level of praxis, does this lead us to the conclusion that anti-fossil fuel protest is also inherently anti-fascist? If so, then anti-hate and anti-fascist advocacy groups would need to elevate climate denialism and obstructionism to a key vector worth monitoring in their respective national contexts, akin to other ‘classic’ far-right issues like anti-immigration and racism.

One problem with doing so, however, has to do with collapsing the boundaries of the mainstream and the far right. If fossil fuel expansionism in a time of climate crisis is inherently far right in that it produces futures where far-right politics becomes more palatable and even ‘reasonable’ sounding to masses of people struggling with insecurity of various kinds, then we must conclude that much of the political spectrum, insofar as they remain committed to fossil fuels, is pushing towards this far-right horizon. In doing so, however, we run the risk of repeating the mistake of some German communists who viewed the Social Democratic Party as ‘social fascists’ – the mistake, in short, of conflating our opponents. Take recent developments in the US, for example. On 23 February 2023, Joe Biden announced a change to US immigration policy that critics argue ‘effectively resurrects Donald Trump's asylum ban’ (Goodfriend, 2023). Then, three weeks later, Biden approved the Willow Project in Alaska, which, in terms of emissions, is the ‘equivalent of adding two new coal-fired power plants to the U.S. electricity system every year’ (Lefebvre & Colman, 2023). While such decisions undoubtedly move us closer to a world governed by the logic of the ‘armed lifeboat’, it would be a mistake to argue that Biden is fascist, let alone far right. If fossil fascism is the purest form of the reactionary political bloc, then what about these hybrids like Biden, who simultaneously deploy market incentives for energy transition while approving fossil mega-projects, and who simultaneously offer relief from the worst excesses of far-right immigration policy, only to implement marginally less severe versions of the same thing? Theoretically, how should we understand the relationship between the political ecologies of centrist liberalism and the far right? And tactically, how should socialists relate to centrist liberalism to make concrete policy gains?

When more radical alternatives are lacking, it is hard to categorically reject the idea that socialists could be forced to lend strategic support to centre-left governments, as a form of electoral self-defence. But this must always be coupled with social movements muscular enough to force their hands. At the same time, however, the pandemic seems to have set us back on this front. With the exception of Black Lives Matter in 2021, the left largely stayed at home at the height of the pandemic, forfeiting the streets to the far-right, anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine movement. The climate left is a long way off from its 2019 peak, and we must urgently rebuild momentum. We must recognize the limitations of the old tactics, and develop new ones. The global climate strike model, for example, should be expanded with the goal of bringing in trade unions and moving towards multi-day strikes of both students and workers. The one-day strikes are far too non-disruptive to shake anybody in power; if Justin Trudeau is willing to participate in such actions, as he did in Montréal at the height of the global climate strike wave in September 2019, then we should probably rethink our approach.

Glimmers of hope, however, come from France. Attempts to articulate the ecological alongside the social followed in the wake of the pension age hike pushed through by Macron in the spring of 2023. The struggle against raising the retirement age carries an environmental dimension, since working less slows ecologically destructive economic growth. Additionally, as hundreds of thousands protested and mobilized against the policy in cities and towns throughout the country, climate activists carried some of this fury to Saint-Soline, a rural town in the west. Marching beneath the banner of Les Soulèvements de la Terre – the Earth's Uprising – thousands of demonstrators (30,000 by some estimates, 6,000 according to the police) gathered to oppose the construction of a giant reservoir, built to secure water supply for the large agri-businesses while diverting water away from smaller farms in the region. This part of the country was scorched in the summer of 2022 as France experienced its most severe drought in history. The demonstration was met by the full force of the state: the police hailed down stun grenades and tear-gas, all the while blocking medical support reaching those in need. Les Soulèvements de la Terre was the first resistance action specifically targeting a policy of ‘climate adaptation’, or rather maladaptation (Budgen, 2023).

If the climate movement is now resisting the form which adaptation takes, the far right is seeking to profit from the backlash against what is cast as mitigation. The Dutch tractor protests against ecological agriculture reforms, for example, cleared the way for the Farmer-Citizen Movement's landslide in the March 2023 provincial elections. Italy and Poland joined Germany to force the handbrake on the original EU plans to phase out the internal combustion engine, while the Christian Democratic Union won the Berlin elections on a racialized and pro-car ticket. The technologies of the transition are in the headlights too, especially with regards to the electrification of private mobility. From electricity transformers overloaded with charging cars to child labour lifting rare battery minerals from the earth, the lines to attack what gets brandished as environmentalism are multiple. Presenting themselves as ‘climate realists’, the far right attempt to exploit some of these contradictions, waging common sense against the ‘climate alarmists’, said to be in thrall to the World Economic Forum and the Chinese Communist Party. The British far right have been rehearsing a version of this script in opposition to urban planning schemes designed to reduce car usage in towns and cities. In practice amounting to little more than bus lanes and bollards, these innocuous designs are portrayed as a sinister ploy to curtail freedom of movement, which left unchecked they claim will be worse than any gulag or ghetto. These demonstrations draw crowds beyond the usual far right: peace campaigners march alongside street-fighting hooligans, disgruntled local residents join up with savvy online influencers. The danger here is of the far right steering a broader anti-environmental coalition converging in defence of fossil fuel freedoms. The left must remain vigilant to these emerging alliances, anticipating the conditions where such movements may flourish.

At the same time, as we rebuild our own movements, we must connect the project of scaling down the fossil economy with the aim of improving the material conditions and strengthening the democratic freedoms of workers across the globe. We need to reckon with the affective popularity of fossil fuels and their technologies, especially in places where they continue to provide uniquely high-paying working-class jobs. There are worrying signs that such communities are becoming a part of the far right's political base. In such contexts, building buy-in for a just transition will require a diversity of tactics, and the toolkit of the left ought to be expanded beyond protest, climate strike and blockade. Fossil capital and authoritarian far-right actors are organizing internationally, making an even stronger case that any left response to the climate crisis must take on a global character. Just as capital's reach is global, so must our understanding of the global working class encompass care labourers and communities on the fringes of the world economic system on whose labour the Global North is materially dependent. In this, we can take inspiration from our namesake, Clara Zetkin, who in 1923 saw a growing fraction of the international working class falling under the sway of fascism and, in response, called for her comrades to ‘initiate the most energetic campaign’ to gain their allegiance (Zetkin, 1983: 110). Indeed, the anti-fascist campaign today must be ‘energetic’ in two senses: urgent, of course, but also aimed squarely at energy transition. The choice today, it seems, is as stark as it was then: eco-socialism or climate barbarism.