Climate change and class conflict in the Anthropocene: sink or swim together?

ABSTRACT

Class is key to understanding the genesis and impacts of climate change. Nevertheless, it is commonly argued that ‘we are all in the same ship’, suggesting that emerging climate politics will not be conflictual along class lines. This paper demonstrates that (agrarian) political economy and political ecology scholars have not adequately scrutinized the relevance of class to contemporary environmental politics to counteract such claims. It also briefly considers two questions – can there be progress without conflict? and can there be conflict without an enemy? – before calling for the development of a Marxist theory of environmental conflicts in the Anthropocene.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• Anthropocene
• class
• conflict
• capitalism‌

I. The same ship

While recent criticisms have shown that the Anthropocene is not merely a geological concept and that it needs to be apprehended within a historical political economy framework (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016), contemporary discussions around how best to transition to sustainability continue to appeal for united action from humanity as a whole. This is especially the case within the context of climate change. Since dramatic sea level rises are one of its most spectacular impacts, it is not surprising that the metaphor of humanity traveling ‘in the same ship’ has emerged as a common image. This trope is often deployed by prominent international actors such as Kofi Annan to argue that ‘we are all at risk’ and that we will ‘sink or swim together’ (Sherriff 2015).

The ‘same ship’ metaphor has been challenged forcefully for two related reasons which show that climate change cannot be understood without explicit reference to socio-economic inequalities (Schmitz and Scoones 2015). On the one hand, the passengers have differing responsibilities in terms of their roles in creating the problem. This has both a historical dimension (much of the existing accumulation is due to the greenhouse gas emissions of already industrialized countries) and one of wealth (a billionaire from Beijing is responsible for much more emissions than a homeless person from London). On the other, adaptation to climate change is ‘intrinsically spatial’ (Shi et al. 2016, 132). A poor Dutch woman might be better protected than a rich Bangladeshi one given the unevenness in the capabilities of their respective countries. It is of course not only one’s national location that matters – gender, race and ethnicity contribute to the inequalities in the vulnerability to the effects of climate change (Adger 2006), as demonstrated in the experience of poor African Americans in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina (Daniels et al. 2006). As recent work in agrarian political economy and political ecology has documented extensively (e.g. Andreucci and Zografos 2022; Bratman, Auch, and Stinchfield 2022; Camargo 2022; Newell 2022), the ship might be one but it is structured along class lines. Poor and marginalised groups who have done little to create the problem and stand to suffer most significantly from the effects are in lower decks. Affluent and powerful groups, who have not only played the leading role in bringing about climate change but can also adapt more freely and dictate climate policies to their benefit, can be found in first class cabins.

If the genesis of climate change and the distribution of its impacts need to be understood by reference to class positions, what about societal responses? More precisely, is it possible to read social conflicts over the environment in general and climate change in particular from a similar Marxist perspective? This is far from clear because there is a fundamental difference between ‘traditional’ and ‘ecological’ distribution conflicts, which emanates from the materiality of climate change in the Anthropocene. Whereas there is no material interest for the members of the bourgeoisie to fight against most of the myriad ills of the capitalist mode of production, they do have a vested interest in overcoming its environmental blind spots because, without genuine and dramatic changes, the negative impacts of climate change are likely to be catastrophic at a planetary scale (Beck 2015). Similarly, contemporary anti-capitalist movements do not have the luxury of ‘cheering on a superstorm’ the way they might a strike or a sit-in (Malm 2018, 207). To take the trope of the common ship one final step, is it possible to expect that the passengers could act (or are already acting) beyond class lines since, in the words of the autonomist Marxist Amadeo Bordiga, ‘if the third class and the crew are not safe, the superior class, that paid stupendous passage fares, is not safe either’ (Bordiga 1956; also see Swyngedouw 2013)?

For Swyngedouw, thinking beyond class within the context of the environment is unrealistic as starkly illustrated by the example of the Titanic, where a ‘large number of the first-class passengers found a lifeship; the others were trapped in the belly of the beast’ (2013, 17). In other words, the ship might be one but the politics and possibilities of the passengers will differ along existing lines of socio-economic inequality, obviating the possibility of cross-class alliances. Chakrabarty, however, has suggested that such a reading is limited by its over-reliance on outdated concepts and behavioural patterns drawn from the study of societal conflicts relating to capitalism. In the Anthropocene, cognizance of the gravity of climate change could lead humanity to see past the cabin structure of the ship, to ‘think of humans on different scales and in different contexts’ (2017, 25) and possibly transcend the lines of socio-economic inequality to tackle the problem collectively. Thus, Chakrabarty asserts that ‘there are no lifeships here for the rich and the privileged’ (Chakrabarty 2009, 221) and that the ‘politics of climate change is more than the politics of capitalism’ (Chakrabarty 2017, 25). The tension between these two positions points toward an important yet surprisingly undertheorised question: what is the relationship between climate change politics and class?

This question in many ways is a precursor to the one asked in the framing paper of this special issue concerning the five types of strategic logics of anti-capitalist struggle codified by Wright (2019, 38–64) and the concrete shape they will take in practice: ‘Who … are the potential social forces behind such political struggles?’ (Borras et al. 2022, 16). The primary ambition of this paper is not to answer these questions as this would require a much larger and empirically grounded analysis. Rather, by critically rereading (agrarian) political economy and political ecology literatures as well as a more disparate collection of environmental studies research, it analyses to what extent and how the class nature of environmental conflicts in general and political responses to climate change in particular has been investigated and theorised.

It argues that neither stream of literature has pursued this line of inquiry with sufficient rigour and that we lack a Marxist theory of conflict that can explain environmental conflicts in general and emerging climate conflicts in particular. Agrarian political economy literature, which has long been the locus classicus of class-centred analyses in the social sciences, has not fully grappled with the implications of the Anthropocene in general and the political implications of catastrophic climate change. Political ecology, another scholarly tradition that is particularly attune to inequality and marginalisation, has not advanced our understanding of class politics in a systematic way either. This is partly because the primary focus of first-generation political ecology has been to demonstrate that the experience of (rather than responses to) environmental change is class-based and the central thrust of second generation has been to show that not just class but also other dimensions of socio-political and cultural differentiation also matter in understanding how the impacts are manifested. In both cases, the relationship between class and political mobilization in response to climate change (including but potentially going beyond) conflict has been left undertheorised.

A third body of work, which draws primarily from sociology and political science, has in fact engaged far more directly with the class nature of environmental politics (including climate change) but very little of this is from a Marxian understanding class. Taken together, the paper argues that there remains work to be done in understanding if and how class dynamics shape political responses to climate change. While this is a fascinating intellectual puzzle – arguably the most important one facing Marxist and Marxian scholarship in the era of the Anthropocene – it is also massively important for political action. As Bernstein put it cogently, ‘understanding class dynamics should always be a point of departure and a central element of’ (2010, 123) transformative activism.

In the next section, the paper situates this challenge within a broader intellectual context by discussing the re-emergence of natural limits as a significant conceptual and empirical factor and the overall decline of class analysis in social sciences and environmental studies’ relationship with this decline. It also provides a very broad framework for a Marxist approach to class, which forms the basis of the subsequent section. The focus there is on three related streams of scholarship: ecological Marxism; political economy of nature; and environmental politics. Building on a critical re-reading of this vast terrain of scholarship, the paper articulates two questions that can guide further thinking on class and climate change: Can there be progress without social conflict? And can there be conflict without an enemy? The brief final section relates these questions back to the theoretical puzzle set out in the introduction, concluding on a question of urgent theoretical and practical significance.

II. Capitalism, limits and conflict

The theoretical tension regarding if and how class dynamics shape climate change politics is best apprehended within the context of the Anthropocene, or more specifically, in the context of the growing awareness that human activities on the planet can now be apprehended in geological terms. It is clear that capitalism has been defining humanity’s relationship with nature for at least a few centuries. The most important implication of the growing awareness of the Anthropocene is arguably the re-emergence of ecological limits as a key political signifier. Shorn off its 1970s neo-Malthusian associations, the concept has now regained its significance in various guises. Martinez-Alier’s work on the intensification of the social metabolism (2009), the concept of ‘planetary boundaries’ (Rockström et al. 2009) and Kallis’ (2019) recent and more direct attempt to reclaim limits for progressive purposes all point towards the acceptance that humanity’s relationship with nature is (and has been for some time) in a crisis circumscribed by what is physically available for human use.

This crisis signals the bankruptcy of capitalist modernity’s cornucopian promise of material prosperity that can be shared with an ever-increasing share of humanity. Looking past the smokescreen of the idea of reforming capitalism – whether it is couched in the language of ecological modernization (Jänicke 2008), circular economy (Korhonen, Honkasalo, and Seppälä 2018), or the Singularity (Morris 2010) – would show that distributional concerns can only be displaced but not fundamentally eliminated. In other words, while the global expansion of capitalism was made possible through various political, economic, and cultural maneuvers – colonialism, class-compromise of social democracy; spatio-temporal fixes of footloose capital; glorification of consumerism; etc. – the challenge posed by the concrete reality of natural limits in the Anthropocene resignifies the centrality of distributional conflicts. Consequently, the value of the environment in its various guises – as resources, as services, as focus of spirituality – has come to be refracted through its finiteness in the Anthropocene and struggles over it can either replace or supplement ‘traditional’ conflicts, those that are over the distribution of surplus value created by labour. To this end, Martinez Alier and O’Connor’s designation of contemporary environmental politics as ecological distribution conflicts is as accurate as it is prescient (Martinez Alier and O’Connor 1995).

But are these ecological distribution conflicts analytically similar enough to traditional conflicts so that they too can be subjected to the same type of class analysis? While there are some obvious parallels between the uneven and unjust appropriation of value produced by human labour and the value produced by the labour of nature (Parenti 2015; also see Battistoni 2017), this is primarily true in the sense of ‘natural resources’ such as timber, oil, and extractive goods in general. However, the picture becomes far more complicated if we also consider ecological ‘bads’ (ecological services are yet another complication). Some of the ‘bads’, for example, the health impacts of an oil spill from a broken pipeline, do accrue to a specific group such as an indigenous community in the Amazon that could perhaps be collectively conceptualized in class-specific terms (e.g. Arsel, Pellegrini, and Mena 2019). However, others might defy spatial and temporal boundaries to such an unprecedent extent, as in the case of nuclear power or biotechnology, that their impact can potentially also evade boundaries of class in terms of who experiences them (Goldblatt 1996).

However, the real difference between traditional distributional conflicts and ecological distribution conflicts in the Anthropocene might emerge when looking at political responses to potentially existential threats. Chakrabarty’s argument resonates here since even according to the dictates of neoclassical economics, rational individuals – including members of the bourgeoisie – would be expected to prioritize the survival of essential planetary ecosystems (if not human species as a whole) over the survival of capitalism so as to ensure their own personal safety. Thus, the joint involvement of distinct classes – including those who are organically implicated in the creation of the very environmental crisis in question – or the potential obsolescence of a Marxist notion of class in such instances cannot by definition be explained away either as green washing, bourgeois false consciousness, altruism or as a form of environmentalism that is a vehicle to achieve various other political goals (Arsel, Akbulut, and Adaman 2015). The analytical utility of class in explaining political struggles is, therefore, very much in question when it comes to environmental problems such as climate change that are, or can be construed as being, linked to planetary survival.

It is important to note that environmental politics is not the only domain in which the currency of class as an analytical concept has been questioned. There is an ongoing if slow-burning discussion regarding the diminished prevalence of class analysis in the social sciences as a whole that aims to articulate how the concept can be revitalized (e.g. Wright 1996; Grusky and Sorensen 1998; Crompton and Scott 1999; Davis 2013). Responses to the decline of class analysis, on which there seems to be little doubt, register several commonalities. For instance, there is incredulity that at this stage of late capitalism, where patterns of inequality especially within nations but across the globe as a whole have deepened and seem to be on the verge of ossifying, the analytical tool specifically and normatively built around the elimination of inequality has waned in influence. While debates regarding socioeconomic inequality have reached the mainstream (Deaton 2013; Saez and Zucman 2016; Piketty 2017), attempts at recognizing it structurally as part of the logic of capitalism seem to be lagging far behind.

Just as perplexing to the participants of this debate is the type of analytical approaches that have come to dominate instead of Marxist class analysis. On the one hand, the hegemony of neoclassical thought has resulted in the imperialism of economics. No longer content to be practicing one of the social sciences, mainstream economists aim to subsume all social scientific inquiry under their methodological and ideological dictates. This unfortunately effective strategy has been possible by perpetrating the dominance of the fictitious and consciously apolitical social actor called the rational individual (Akbulut, Adaman, and Madra 2015). On the other, post-modern and post-structural approaches, despite paying lip service to broader and historical inequalities unleashed by the rise of capitalism, are unable to replace the task carried out by Marxist class analysis. This is not to argue that race, gender, and ethnicity are unimportant but that their fundamental malleability makes them unsuitable for grounded political economy analysis on their own (Chibber 2006). This is especially so since the persistent focus of post-modern and post-structural theory on the limitations of structural explanations unwittingly contributes to accounts that privilege if not the individual then the potentially just as vacuous concept of community. Put differently, the type of approach that has come to fill the void left by class analysis is ultimately apolitical regardless of its provenance since it fails to apprehend social change through the transformation of underlying economic structures.

While decline of class analysis overall and its limited deployment in environmental conflicts, in particular, is notable, the irony of the fact that the acceptance of the environmental problematique as a central concern for political economy was only possible because of the challenges to the validity of orthodox class analysis is inescapable. Concern for the environment, as with concern for gender, race and ethnicity, was often written off from 1960s onwards if not as false consciousness then as being a second-order concern that could be dealt with once the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie was transcended. To the extent that environmental studies in general and political ecology, in particular, were able to rise to scholarly significance, this was necessarily achieved at the expense of orthodox Marxism that left little room for anything but ‘traditional’ class conflict. It is not surprising, therefore, that ‘first generation’ political ecology (Biersack and Greenberg 2006), which crystallized in the first edition of Peet and Watts’ ‘Liberation Ecologies’ (Peet and Watts 1996), while aiming to put capitalism squarely within its analytical viewfinder, emerged from a broader attempt at reconciling radical political economy with post-modernist and post-structuralist approaches. Having established the political nature of environmental change by illuminating the ways in which capitalism’s relationship with nature feeds off and reproduces socio-economic inequalities, political ecology has since moved toward asking more pointed questions about pathways to constructing an alternative to capitalism. This ‘second generation’ political ecology, developing within a broader context in which decoloniality has come to be seen as the vanguard of critical inquiry, has moved further away from the concerns of orthodox Marxism. This is mainly because orthodox Marxism and its conceptual toolkit have been charged as being a constituent part of the logic of Eurocentric dominance – economically, politically as well as racially – that need to be systematically dismantled. As such, for much of contemporary political ecology literature, anti-capitalist struggle is no longer expected to be waged through class struggle and analytical attention is consequently focused on socio-cultural markers of difference rather than a materially grounded conceptualisation of class.

As the preceding discussion shows, the decline of the primacy of class analysis itself is overdetermined and was important for the growth of environmental inquiry. Therefore, the critique that follows is not intended as a call for purity of dogma. To the extent that it suggests the absence of rigorous class analysis in the study of environmental change, this is not argued from the vantage point of a strict definition. In fact, given the breadth and depth of debates on the meaning of class within traditional, analytical and post-Marxists (as well those that don’t easily fit into these categories), articulating a single definition and treating it ‘as if it were the only or the ultimate or the universally agreed kind of class analysis’ (Resnick and Wolf 2003, 8) would be a Procrustean exercise.

Nevertheless, it would be useful to sketch out several building blocks of Marxist class analysis that can be used, broadly, to develop the proceeding critique of (agrarian) political economy and political ecology (the discussion of the third stream of literature is centred around other, competing approaches to class, including Weberian and Bourdieusian ones). First, political consciousness (class-in-itself) and action (class-for-itself) emerge from material foundations, though this cannot be reduced simply to the economic and can be conceptualised to include larger societal power relations that can contain social and cultural bases of difference as well. Second, inequality between groups in the distribution of these assets has structural implications to political processes in general and reproduction of the prevailing mode of production in particular. Third, further emphasizing the centrality of inequality, the concept of class is fundamentally relational and experiential. Fourth, capitalism as a mode of production structures all contemporary political relations. Finally, the relationship between different classes is overall and in the long durée, though not necessarily at every given moment, characterised by antagonism.

These contours are offered not as an hortatory effort for definitional purity and more in the spirit of delineating a broadly Marxist reading. As such, they are largely in line with a type of conceptualisation that can also be found in the Communist Manifesto though with certain modifications that draw from more recent interventions, drawing particular inspiration from E.P. Thompson (1971; Sewell 1990) and, to a lesser extent, the contributions of E.O. Wright (1997, 1999). While they are presented in an abstract form, they are intended to reflect the challenges posed by environmental degradation in general and climate change in particular within the context of contemporary global capitalism.

III. Theorizing class and environment

It is within these intellectual and ecological contexts that the relevance of class to societal responses to climate change in particular and environmental degradation in general need to be scrutinized. This is undoubtedly a massive and rapidly expanding body of work. What follows engages primarily with contributions that explicitly focus on the relationship between capitalism (and, in certain cases, capitalism together with modernity) and nature with a view to critically reading their (non-)utilization of class to understand societal responses. For the sake of analytical clarity, the critique of this literature is presented under three headings. While they are handled separately, these streams do of course cross and build on each other.

The first focuses primarily on the logic of capitalism as a mode of production and how its relationship with nature should be conceptualized, especially in relation to the growing awareness that nature can no longer be treated as infinitely abundant (e.g. Burkett 1999). This approach can be described as the political economy of nature. The second is more directly concerned with the impact of capitalism on nature and society and can be subsumed under the joint rubric of agrarian political economy and political ecology (e.g. Pye 2021; Svarstad and Benjaminsen 2020). It focuses especially on the differential impacts of capitalism on specific spaces, natures and communities as well as how these communities respond or fight back (actor network theory influenced variants of this work also focuses on the agency of non-human entities, e.g. Bennett 2009). While this is a somewhat arbitrary distinction, the first can be seen as a study of capitalism’s internal workings vis-à-vis nature and the second of the distribution of its impacts. In different ways, both literatures are concerned with understanding how nature (and society, or for some, socio-natures, e.g. Swyngedouw 1999) is made more amenable for the continuation and deepening of processes of accumulation and how peasant and marginalized communities resist and articulate alternatives. Both of these two streams are built around a commitment to Marxian political economy. The third stream explicitly focuses on societal reactions to environmental change, including but going beyond, conflicts. It is in this stream where class is explicitly and consistently discussed and, perhaps surprisingly, a substantial portion of these contributions come from environmental sociologists that do not write within a Marxist framework.

A. Political economy of nature

This first stream of explicitly Marxist literature on environmental studies can also be described as ‘ecological Marxism’ (Kovel 1995; Benton 1996; Burkett 1999). The main thrust of this literature was to discover the ‘green Marx’ by re-reading his writings with the fresh set of eyes provided by the post-World War II boom in environmental consciousness and to rework Marxist concepts to suit explicitly environmentalist analytical ends. James O’Connor’s ‘second contradiction of capitalism’ is emblematic in this regard (1988). The first contradiction is essentially one of overproduction of goods, creating an ever-widening gulf between labour’s shrinking ability to consume and capitalism’s ever-expanding ability to produce. As this gulf widens, it is expected that the tension would lead to revolutionary change that will result in labour assuming full control of the means of production. O’Connor’s second contradiction is one of underproduction, namely the ability of capital to reproduce the natural conditions (which includes ecological as well as human foundations of capitalism) that it needs to thrive. As capitalism continues to demand more and more resources both for the production of goods and absorption of ‘bads’, it undermines ecosystems’ ability to reproduce themselves (which is a crisis that is also intimately linked to the crisis of social reproduction, as richly argued by socialist eco-feminism, e.g. Salleh 1995). O’Connor argues, therefore, that ‘there may exist a contradiction of capitalism which leads to an ‘ecological’ theory of crisis and social transformation’ (O’Connor 1988, 14).

O’Connor’s contribution was more in terms of the development of a theoretical postulate, whose precise machinations were left for other scholars to describe. How the crisis would come about was best described by the work of John Bellamy Foster, who revived the concept of ‘ecological rift’, which was coined by Marx (Foster 1999). What Foster and his collaborators have effectively done is to materially illustrate O’Connor’s somewhat nebulous theoretical formulation, giving it analytical purchase by linking actual ecological concepts with economic dynamics. To the extent that Foster’s conceptual-methodological breakthrough is an essential component in the ecological Marxist toolbox, it concerns the emergence of the material conditions upon which the contradiction would emerge rather than how it would be resolved. To wit, in the eponymous book of 544 pages there are only a handful of direct references to class, none of which actually deal with the social transformation question (Foster, Clark, and York 2010). In short, Foster’s approach illustrates well the analytical ambitions of the political economy of nature literature, which does not theorize class-based action in relation to environmental degradation. Nevertheless, O’Connor himself is clearly attuned to the significance of how the second contradiction of capitalism might unleash revolutionary forces. After laying out the analytical foundations of the second contradiction, he makes this bold but problematic assessment:

The combination of crisis-stricken capitalism externalising more costs, the reckless use of technology and nature for value realisation in the sphere of circulation, and the like, must sooner or later lead to a ‘rebellion of nature’, that is, to powerful social movements demanding an end to ecological exploitation. (1988, 32)

Putting aside the fundamental anthropocentricism of the argument that ‘rebellion of nature’ is in fact human social movements speaking on behalf of nature [a critique that the concept of the Anthropocene, where the earth itself emerges as an actant, seems to anticipate Davies (2016)], O’Connor does not at all specify who would comprise these ‘powerful social movements’. Demonstrating perhaps that this puzzle is particularly thorny, his concluding thoughts bypass the question as to who comprises these ‘powerful social movements’ to focus instead on who should not be defining the character of the environmental backlash against capitalism. Responding to the seeming contradiction that the emerging political response to capitalism’s crisis has taken the shape of the worryingly ‘post-class’ new social movements, O’Connor is interested mainly in critiquing the post-Marxist thought of Laclau and Mouffe (1985) as well as Offe (1985). Summarily dismissing the significance of new social movements (as discussed below) by likening them to ‘other fringe movements’, he predicts that they are ‘bound to self-destruct’ (1988, 32). What remains from his analysis is the implicit assumption that the ‘powerful social movements’ brought up by the second contradiction would conform to the class-based features anticipated by the first contradiction. However, as Martinez Alier has argued ‘environmental conflicts … do not always correspond to fights between workers and capitalists. Sometimes they do, like pollution in a factory. But quite often the actors are different … who are the protagonists of what O’Connor called the second contradiction of capitalism?’ (Pellegrini 2012, 349).

Another problematic aspect of O’Connor’s second contradiction thesis is its failure to anticipate that capital (with the assistance of the state) could convert its own crisis into a new accumulation strategy and in so doing mollify emerging societal responses. This is mainly a failure to anticipate that global ecological crisis would become an undeniable fact (the US experience in climate denialism notwithstanding), one that is more convenient to respond to than to ignore. Capital’s embrace of the environmental problematic is itself a function partly of the availability of scientific and technological alternatives [e.g. the successful global response to the Ozone layer owes much to the fact that DuPont already had a compound lined up to replace the CFCs, (Maxwell and Briscoe 1997)] and partly of the regulatory possibilities made possible by the neoliberal turn, whose dominance starting from the late 1970s dovetails the mainstreaming of environmentalism.

The literature on neoliberal conservation (e.g. Büscher et al. 2012), responds precisely to the innovative environmental mechanisms that began to emerge in the neoliberal era as nature – pace Polanyi (1957) – is transformed into a highly valuable commodity that goes beyond the traditionally traded goods such as oil and timber. While its debt to O’Connor is rarely expressed, neoliberal conservation can be read as an attempt to update his work, primarily by showing how the second contradiction fails to materialize (Arsel and Büscher 2012). The update is needed precisely because social forces had begun – as discussed in the third part of this section – to rise up to demand meaningful action against an increasingly undeniable global ecological crisis. To a lesser but certainly not an insignificant extent, the mounting of environmental problems also came to be a barrier to further accumulation in certain sectors, demonstrating that just as social actors, capitalists too can display a degree of internal heterogeneity in relation to environmental politics (see, for e.g. Paterson 2001 and also the conclusion of this article). Thus, given these economic and political imperatives to respond to the environmental crisis, capital (and the state) moved from deregulation (of the economy so that environmental impacts could be externalized) to reregulation (of nature so that environmental impacts could be internalized as profit opportunities), a transition explicitly and forcefully endorsed by the Stern report (2007) within the context of climate change. This transition made it possible to convert the ability of the atmosphere into a tradable commodity by creating (with the help of the state) tradable emissions markets but also to achieve the commodification of environmental services. In all such instances, the creation of new structures of ownership were decisive in the realization of such ‘innovations’, which, in a climate of neoliberal multiculturalism fed off existing demands for new forms of territorial sovereignty by marginalized communities such as peasants and indigenous groups. The sum of these transformations made environmentalism a source of profit, creating a new breed of entrepreneurs singing the gospel of win-win-win solutions (Arsel and Büscher 2012). Where these solutions failed to achieve results (which was most often) or failed to convince that the solutions were meaningful, the promise of future scientific breakthroughs continue to be dangled as talismans as exemplified by the massive investment in geoengineering technologies (Buck 2019).

The labour of neoliberal conservation scholars has focused primarily on how these mechanisms were articulated, justified and implemented. Societal responses to them, however, have not been studied systematically. This is not to suggest that conflicts have not been tackled. However, they are treated as case studies demonstrating the unevenness once again of capitalist market mechanisms in creating winners and losers. To the extent that class enters these discussions, it is to suggest (accurately) that neoliberalism is a class project to create renewed domination of labour, peasantry, indigenous people, and other marginalized actors. However, the protagonists are not theorized beyond recording their (usually) negative experiences and describing the shape of their fight to stop or slow down the commodification of their life spaces. More significantly, they are not studied as movements whose class positions and strategies are unpacked but as examples of the fundamental destructiveness of neoliberal conservation. In other words, they assume that the resistance of a given marginalised community is a class struggle since it challenges the expansion and deepening of capitalist dynamics without concretely theorising what the concept of class might signify within the context of, for instance, an indigenous community in the Ecuadorian Amazon or poor farmers in the Turkish countryside. In the absence of careful Marxist engagement with social movements, mainstream political science approaches have come to dominate (Silver and Karatasli 2015). Even a cursory glance at this literature shows that not only class but the concept of capitalism itself is largely absent.

Whereas the neoliberal conservation literature aims to unearth how capitalism’s relationship with nature has been evolving to create new and more intensive ways in which the environment could be integrated into the class-project of neoliberal capitalism, Jason Moore’s suis generis Marxism has opened up an entirely new way to conceptualize the capitalism-nature link. His approach harks back to the earlier generation of ecological Marxism in the sense that Moore is fundamentally concerned with understanding how ecology forms a barrier to capital’s future reproduction (Moore 2015). In other words, Moore, contrary to the neoliberal conservation literature whose post-structural undercurrents prevent it from acknowledging the material limits of accumulation, is squarely concerned with them and how these are continuously challenged by transformative social processes. However, departing from first-generation ecological Marxists who saw nature as an external constraint on capital, his innovative move is to reject what he sees as a Cartesian dualist separation between ecology and economy. Rather than capital vs. nature, his construction is capital-in-nature, which is itself a class-relationship since labour (and humans as well as other living and non-living components of nature) are implicated on both sides of this unity.

Moore clearly sees a role for class struggle to overthrow the unity of capital-in-nature. This seems to be transmitted via a Polanyian reclamation of the autonomy of society to give nature as well as society’s relationship with it meanings that defy the capitalist logic of value, which sees ‘all elements of human and extra-human nature [as] effectively interchangeable’ (Moore 2018). This is as clear a description of contemporary struggles – from food sovereignty to land grabbing to commoning – as one could make. Yet, Moore’s formulation still does not go far enough in terms of placing class conflict centrally into attempts to transcend capitalism. Moore sees all these conflicts through capitalism’s dependence on ‘cheap nature’ [a theme he develops more extensively with Raj Patel (Patel and Moore 2017)]. Here his acknowledgement of ecological limits comes back to hobble his argument because what he ultimately anticipates the fall of capitalism to be is the ecological limits themselves. To the extent that class conflict figures prominently in his non-dualist vision, he seems to be arguing that class conflict will not only be functional to limits being confronted but, ontologically, animated by the limits themselves. While this technically shows a certain loyalty to an orthodox approach to materialism, it neglects the fact that many of the contemporary environmental struggles are not simply about the material availability of resources but the specific constellation of meanings they are imbued with. Put differently, food sovereignty, for example, is not strictly about the availability of sufficient amount of calories but the specific shape those calories take and authority over how they are created, transported and consumed.

This leads to two related problems for Moore’s formulation. His vision of a ‘rebellion’ against the ‘value/monoculture nexus of modernity’ is too rigid to include symbolic struggles over nature. More significantly, his over-reliance on limits to be the driving force not only smacks of unwarranted optimism that capital is unable to find ever new ways to displace its impacts and/or co-opt sufficiently powerful communities to secure enough legitimacy to extend the exploitation of nature in novel ways. It also is a type of reverse neo-Smithianism in the sense that as dependency scholars falsely saw the rise of capitalism as a function of intensified trade (Brenner 1977), Moore expects its fall to be an outcome of the inability of the system to keep trading more and more cheap goods.

The contemporary terrain of ecological distribution conflicts, however, are far more complicated than Moore’s formulation can capture. Not only the struggles are not necessarily at the edges of systemic limits as such but they also do not necessarily seem to take a class-specific shape. Moore implicitly acknowledges this when he theorizes these struggles as ‘the struggle over the relation between humans and the rest of nature is necessarily a class struggle. (But not just a class struggle)’(2015, 150; original italics). The thought in brackets works less as a clarification and more as an attempt to postpone serious reckoning with the question as to who exactly will lead the rebellion against capitalism’s colonization of nature.

B. Agrarian political economy and political ecology of capitalism

Arguably, the stream of social scientific research that has shown most sustained and serious investment into class analysis in recent decades is agrarian political economy. This intellectual position is to a large extent a function of this group of scholars’ commitment to understanding (and defending) the peasantry, both in terms of its mode of production but also as a socio-political force (Borras 2009; Bernstein and Byers 2001; Bernstein 2010; Friedmann 2019). Given the centrality of the concept of class, there has been much work providing both conceptual nuance to how to differentiate and identify (peasant) classes as well as those enriching these discussions in terms of specific geographic contexts (Cousins 2011; Harriss-White 2018; Lerche and Shah 2018; Schneider 2015).

Space limitations and the a priori commitment to the survival of the peasantry [except, in dissenting traditions, such as the Warrenites (Kiely 2009)] are not the only reasons why an extensive discussion of these mostly intra-community debates cannot be fully synthesized here. It is also possible to argue that the ecology question has received scant attention in this body of work (beyond those concentrating around the question of metabolic rift as discussed above). This is not to suggest that environmental change, land degradation and other cognate problems have not been tackled. But these have either focused on the environment primarily as a productive resource (as land, water, etc.) or as another dimension along which marginalisation takes places or is exacerbated rather than class-based environmentalist action. This also broadly applies to the agrarian political economy of climate change, which foregrounds the impact of climate change and adaptation processes aimed at mitigating it (e.g. rise of biofuels) rather than its mobilising potential [Raju Das’s nearly 700-page entreaty on class analysis, for instance, only mentions climate change once in a foonote (Das 2017)!].

There are of course exceptions to this overall subsumption of ecological concerns under historic lines of defence by the peasantry. The most significant one is centred around the ‘ecological agrarian question’, the seventh and final one of the contemporary agrarian questions proposed by Akram-Lodhi and Kay. The concept ‘requires paying close attention to the ways in which the capital-labour relation shapes and is shaped by the prevailing ecology and as such is about how rural labour processes and ecological processes are intertwined’ (Akram-Lodhi 2021, 701). While this certainly gestures in the direction of centralising the link between class and environmentalism, the focus, even when it is explicitly on how environmental problems create ‘the preconditions for a set of social and political struggles that promote farming systems’ (701) remains inwardly focused and does not question if and how the threat of climate change in the Anthropocene affects the political consciousness of peasants and agriculture producers. Consequently, Akram-Lodhi points towards agro-ecology as a potential solution, which, notwithstanding the strengths of agro-ecology, demonstrates the closed-loop nature of theorising the environmental challenge in the agrarian political economy literature. A similar posture is also evident in Saguin (2016), who is primarily interested in ‘articulating the place of nature in agrarian change’, Neimark and Healy (2018), who are concerned with how ecological transition dynamics (in this case, the European Union’s bioeconomy) created gendered outcomes, and Latorre (2021), who focuses on a broader sets of processes of marginalization. In effect, this more ecological turn in agrarian political economy does not so much theorise the link between class and nature as bringing the literature closer in synch with the political ecology literature (discussed below).

Beyond the ecological agrarian question, agrarian political economy research is gradually taking up the question of class positions and political struggles. Perhaps surprisingly, much of this literature is pointing towards not necessarily the diminishing of the centrality of class positions nor the uniqueness of the peasant class as a bulwark against capitalism’s excesses. Rather there is considerable soul searching regarding the need to form cross-class alliances as a precondition for achieving sustainable development. For example, Scoones’ expansive review article on the politics of sustainability and development underscores the salience of alliance building (2016). More recently, writing about the protests of Dutch farmers against climate change mitigation measures, van der Ploeg (2020) points in a similar direction by highlighting the multi-class nature of the movement but also warning that such a force could fall prey to the appeals of regressive populism and ultimately fail to serve the needs and interests of peasant producers.

Ultimately, there are signs in the agrarian political economy literature that class and climate change require some reconsideration of certain long-cherished intellectual dogmas (though, of course, the valuable instinct to resist the watering down of key concepts is also alive and well as demonstrated by Pye’s (2021) strong defence of the proletariat as the revolutionary class). In their special issue, Levien, Watts, and Yan (2018) highlight the very question at the heart of this paper as one of the generative questions for future work in agrarian political economy, drawing attention to the Marxist connections between climate change and the Anthropocene. Echoing Bernstein’s warning that the ‘social locations and identities the working poor inhabit, combine and move between make for ever more fluid boundaries and defy inherited assumptions of fixed and uniform notions of ‘worker’, ‘farmer’, ‘petty trader’, ‘urban’, ‘rural’, ‘employed’, and ‘self-employed’’ (2010, 111), Scoones argues that any future transformation would have to ‘draw on an unruly politics, involving diverse knowledges, and multiple actors’(2016, 293). The paper framing this special issue also points in the same direction when it suggests that ‘the way agrarian struggles – led by peasants, pastoralists, fisherfolk, rural workers and others – connect with the challenge of climate change, linking to and going beyond the already widespread challenges to expropriation and extraction in rural areas, is a vital focus for both thinking and action’ (Borras et al. 2022, 2). In short, recent agrarian political economy has opened the door to rethinking (and reconstructing) the link between class, climate change and agrarian political economy but this work is in its infancy.

Arguably, class is a more explicit component of the now vast literature on political ecology of climate change, though this applies primarily to the distribution of environmental impacts and does not yield a class-centred study of resulting conflicts. Its proponents have built on the ground prepared by early ecological Marxists as well as scholars from other cognate (sub)fields, be it cultural geography, social anthropology, or environmental history. Explicitly targeting power relations, political ecology concerns itself with more than the ‘environmental’ in the sense that the literature captures the complex interrelations between ecological change and the political economic dynamics surrounding them. The goal of this approach is ultimately to demonstrate how the creation and maintenance of environmental inequalities within capitalism are fundamentally political and interrelated with myriad other spheres such as health, gender, indigeneity, and race.

Increased attention to these attributes within the context of a Marxist framework has certainly done much to correct orthodox Marxism’s blind spots. Perhaps in part because of the need to empirically demonstrate how factors beyond class do matter in apprehending the unevenness of capitalist economic dynamics and that they deserve analytical and political support in terms of the conflicts they generate, political ecology has excelled in delivering fine-grained documentation of various conflagrations at the local level. This variegated understanding of capitalism’s impact on the ground did also attend to class in addition to race, gender, and ethnicity. However, rather than seeing class as a meta-structure interpenetrating all these attributes, political ecology literature has succumbed to a facile intersectional approach that treats class as simply another marker of difference with no analytical priority.

This reluctance to theorize capitalism’s link with nature through class terms also continued in terms of understanding movements of resistance. Here the impact of political ecology’s entanglement with both Foucauldian post-structuralism and, more problematically, with post-development thinking has come at the expense of not only willingness to theorize broadly but also ability to recognize structural conditions that animate movements. Instead, political ecology literature has taken community-level acts of resistance as ontologically coherent entities rather than as part of a greater whole (though there are some notable exceptions, e.g. Martinez Alier et al. 2016). To this end, it is possible to see the common refrain of ‘fine-grained’ inquiry not simply as a methodological choice but an ideological posture that celebrates each movement as unique and context-specific. As such, the analytical terrain for understanding counter-movements in the ecological sphere were ceded to the new social movements and resource mobilization theories as already mentioned above.

This admittedly broad-brush picture of political ecology’s relationship to class needs to be qualified in two ways. One concerns Martinez-Alier and Guha’s ‘environmentalism of the poor’ (1997), which is discussed in the next section. The other is the transposition of the concept of class from relationships of production to international distribution of wealth and power. Specifically, in the absence of class as a driving leitmotif in terms of struggles against capital in ecological distribution conflicts, political ecology has transposed it to the global arena. By so doing, rather than apprehending class positions of individuals, political ecology has recognized a class relationship between rich and poor countries in a manner consonant with dependency theory’s spatial ordering of the world along centre and periphery. While this view does have much merit in terms of flows of financial resources, corporate ownership structures, and ‘othering’ of communities and spaces, it cannot fulfil the function of the class analysis that takes social classes as its starting point.

Furthermore, while a robust defence of the concept of periphery is very much possible (Fischer 2015), the division is nevertheless coming under increasing critical scrutiny [as with most divisions that are built around the notion of ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ (Horner and Hulme 2017)]. For instance, the literature on environmental justice does show that race as well as class in developed countries correlate with certain exposure to environmental harms in much the same way as it does in the developing world (Nixon 2011). Similarly, the arrival on the development scene of countries such as China whose position in this global class relationship are much harder to capture within existing political ecology conceptualizations (Henderson, Appelbaum, and Ho 2013). Ultimately, it is still possible to assert that while political ecology has demonstrated the unevenness of capitalism’s environmental impacts, leading to the possibility of empirically seeing how class is a central concern, it has not done sufficient analytical labour to show how inequality and class in terms of environmental struggles connect together.

This might not simply a problem of misaligned intellectual posture. The environmental conflicts that have been emerging from around the world themselves have been shy of using a language of class themselves. This could be due to various reasons. In certain contexts, the language of environmentalism was deployed consciously and deliberately instead of left-wing repertoires of dissent. For instance, some of the most prominent environmental movements in Turkey were built by former leftist activists, who had suffered heavily under military repression during the 1970s and 1980s (Arsel 2003; Arsel, Akbulut, and Adaman 2015). In others, instead of domestic political considerations, environmentalism was the chosen vehicle of activists because of the expected gains that can be made in the international sphere from relatively mainstream campaigners and non-governmental organizations. The Ogoni struggle in Nigeria remains the epitome of such strategic positioning (Agbonifo 2018). The overall intellectual climate too can shape the way environmental conflicts can downplay their class-specific demands. As mentioned already, within the contemporary political landscape, neoliberalism (and neoliberal multiculturalism, see Hale 2005) from the right and decoloniality from the left create the conditions for the ascension of identity-based demands to public prominence. It is not, surprising, therefore that many Latin American ecological distribution conflicts congregate around the language of indigenous rights (leading to problematic cases where certain groups suddenly and without much cultural or historical foregrounding discover their own indigeneity; see for example, Fernandez-Salvador 2018; Fontana 2014). Faced with such struggles, political ecologists have chosen to replicate the overall political climate by privileging indigenous and other non-class based identities in their conceptualization of ecological distribution conflicts even in cases where class-specific demands do enter the picture (Pellegrini and Arsel 2018).

C. Class dimensions of ecological distribution conflicts

The failure of ecological Marxism as well as agrarian political economy and political ecology to tackle class directly is likely to due to the fact that it is ‘much easier to celebrate class struggle than to analyze it’ (Moore 2015, 38). In the absence of a theoretically consistent treatment of how class struggle fits into environmental movements confronting capitalism, there has nevertheless emerged a vibrant discussion regarding class and environmentalism in disparate parts of environmental politics and (environmental) sociology. While some of these have developed directly in response to one another (e.g. Martinez Alier and Guha’s ‘environmentalism of the poor’ as a critique of Inglehart’s post-materialism), others have emerged as part of sociological debates that arrived at environmental politics by way of a broader questioning of modernity and capitalism (e.g. Beck’s reflexive materialism). As such, rather than forming distinct intellectual traditions (such as ecological Marxism or political ecology), they represent disparate strands of inquiry that can be compartmentalized between two opposing camps: those who argue class is not important or at least is marginal to contemporary environmental politics, and those who argue that it is, in different ways. A related third stream of literature that builds on these traditions recognizes the class composition of contemporary struggles but does not necessarily conceive of this dimension in a classically Marxist lens that is inherently conflictual.

i. Post-class environmentalism

The argument that class is not a salient factor in understanding contemporary politics of societal transformation in relation to environmental problems itself can be read in terms of two separate literatures. While both of these focus on the changes wrought by what can be termed ‘high modernity’ and the consequent rise of a ‘postmodern world’ (Pichardo 1997), one focuses on changes in social structures ranging from individual self-perception to family ties to state-society dynamics (e.g. Offe 1985) and the other is primarily interested in how both the materiality of nature and its societal perceptions have been transformed (Beck 1992). Both literatures point to the rise of ‘new social movements’ as a decisive moment for political subjectivities under capitalism (Melucci 1988). In so doing, they bundle ecological politics with other critical political processes that similarly challenge the authoritative scripts of Western modernity on various grounds of identity, be it race, ethnicity or gender. Even if it’s not explicitly acknowledged, these analyses suffer from the linearity of much of Western social theory (resulting in such distinctions as ‘first modernity’ and ‘second modernity’). They apply primarily to the industrialized countries in the West, though the popularity of ‘new social movements’ and the ‘reflexive modernisation’ literatures mentioned above have travelled beyond their original geographical settings in Western Europe and the United States (e.g. Veltmeyer 1997; Dwivedi 1999).

The first stream of criticism is part of an intellectual tradition borne out of the intensifying signs that state-centred management of society via bureaucratic and technological interventions had entered a regressive phase, with the idea of progress losing its cachet and coming to stand for ‘an awful desolation, insecurity and simple nullity’ (Latouche 1993, 13). Given the disillusionment with the overall project of modernity, its key institutions, not only the state but labour unions and other established channels for political action, had become decentred from political life. Part of this fall from grace of course relates to the inability of the political institutions of modernity to take seriously concerns such as gender equality, persistent racial discrimination, growing ecological degradation and the obstinately centripetal forces of identity formation and fragmentation. Failure to respond to these challenges was seen as systemic – rather than episodic failures of the state or the market – and thus all major political concepts undergirding this sphere came to be discredited. A corollary of this view was a rejection of the idea that ‘a single political economic transformation would solve the whole range of social ills’ (Calhoun 1993). The diminishing of class and the elevation of various types of identity-based formations can be understood within this context. To reiterate, within this reading, the rise of the environmental challenge to modernity is only one aspect of a process of disenchantment with modernity. The rise of these critiques not only discredited class as a central concept but also opened up new political avenues for political action, which came to be known as ‘new social movements’ that organized themselves differently both in terms of composition and action, perceived their relationship to modern institutions reflexively, and made demands that were not defined by material redistribution.

The novelty of new social movements, therefore, emerges not simply from the newness of their demands – e.g. an end to environmental degradation – but also the manner in which they are conceptualized as part of the Western political sphere. As such, their main forms of solidarity are expected to go beyond class both because the onset of a postindustrial economic landscape rendered some of the class-based concerns reduntant but also because the subjectivity of the political actors affected by these issues went across class lines, even if they were to be accepted to persist to a certain extent. These two arguments form a unity when applied to the context of environmental change. The first is tantamount to asserting that to the extent that inequalities in material attainment remain in the post-industrial landscape, these are either not so grave to be a central organizing principle for social actors or that their consequences in terms of the achievement of life satisfaction are not especially salient. The second suggests that the environmental changes experienced in these contexts cut across class lines and manifest their impacts in a class-less fashion. Putting these two together would yield an argument that the experience of and, therefore, political responses to environmental degradation is, fundamentally, a post-class dynamic. Beck’s famously misguided aphorism that ‘poverty is hierarchic, smog is democratic’ (1992, 36) summarizes the putative irrelevance of class to environmental political action and, therefore, to social theory.

As the discussion on political ecology has demonstrated, smog and most other manifestations of environmental degradation are not at all democratic and do fall along lines of class as well as race and gender (Curran 2018a). However, Beck’s contribution to this debate goes beyond this unfortunate assertion. Focusing also on the manner in which environmental questions arise rather than on simply how they affect the world, Beck has argued that there is a fundamental qualitative difference between environmental problems in the contemporary era, which he designates as ‘reflexive modernity’ or ‘second modernity’. Many of the environmental problems characteristic of this era defy the geographic, temporal and, indeed, class barriers to which environmental problems in first modernity adhered. As such ‘this means that the divisions and tensions that are inherent in the risk society cannot be analyzed properly using traditional analytical prisms of class, gender, and age’ (Mythen 2021, 537). For instance, in Beck’s smog example, air pollution from a coal power plant settle on a reasonably small and clearly delineable area, affect mostly communities in the current or a few future generations, and impact on those who do not have the means to relocate to a healthier location (e.g. labour working in the plant itself). Radioactivity from a nuclear power plant, however, affects a vastly greater geographic area, lasts for countless generations and makes it much harder (or at least much more costly) for the affluent to escape from its (long-term) path. That said, it is important to recognize that the differences between these two types of risks – emerging from different type of technologies characterizing different phases of modernity – are more useful as stylized facts rather than ecological truths (after all, impact of smog can in fact stay in the ground for several centuries).

Beck’s argument is essentially a commentary on the institutions underpinning the creation and societal rollout of advanced scientific and technological innovations. Beck argues that given their massive complexity, they defy the institutions that were created to regulate capitalist modernity. Technologies such as nuclear radioactivity and genetic modification operate at such a rarified scientific sphere that existing bureaucratic and political mechanisms to assess their viability, desirability and perimeters of operation simply cease to function in a meaningful manner. For instance, elected members of a national parliament are unlikely to be equipped with the necessary scientific training to be able to design effective and realistic regulation to deal with the potential impacts of biotechnology. The burden of knowledge to assess these technologies would be so high as to render meaningful communication from scientific expert bodies to ‘laypersons’ extremely unfeasible (Wynne 1994). Taking the argument further, Beck suggests that given the vast time horizons in question and the total and complete annihilation of humanity and all life on earth emerging as a distinct potentiality for the first time in human history, society might not be equipped with the institutional infrastructure and the necessary moral horizon required with dealing with the problems created by ‘reflexive modernity’ itself.

In practice, therefore, regulation of science and technology under reflexive modernity is primarily a theatre of regulation rather than actual regulation, a situation described by Beck as ‘organized irresponsibility’. Within this climate, with science and technology acting as a runaway train, noone is deemed to be safe as the magnitude of risks are far too great to respect class lines. In effect, while Beck’s aphorism does not work with smog, his argument holds more appeal if phrased as ‘radioactivity is democratic’ since it and other similar risks (e.g. risks from ‘runaway biotechnology’ and extreme manifestations of climate change) are expected to defeat the potential material and spatial barriers the affluent classes can erect to protect themselves. Nevertheless, Beck’s seemingly total rejection of class (along with ethnicity, nuclear families, etc.) as a ‘zombie’ category is, as Curran aptly describes it, bombastic (2018b, 30).

Rather than seeing him as an essentially post-class social theorist (as he himself had adamantly claimed), Curran has attempted to reconcile Beck’s otherwise significant highlighting of risk (and risk exposure) with Marxist and, to a lesser extent, with Bourdieusian class analysis. This has taken two different analytical tracks. First, Curran has argued that there exists remarkable analytical symmetry between Marx’s and Beck’s problematization of the modern world (Curran 2016). This symmetry can be found not only in the way they both focus on the implications the development of productive forces have on nature-society relationships but also in their theoretical focus on the necessity of bringing key aspects of modern society under democratic control. Their resulting analysis is certainly symmetrical in the sense that in ‘Beck’s theory of risk society, risk occupies the same structural position that class occupies in Marx’s historical materialism’ (281). The fundamental difference between the experience of risk and exploitation, however, limits the effectiveness of this line of defence of Beck’s work, mainly serving to highlight that he – as with most Western European social theorists – owes an immense debt to Marx’s analytical method.

Curran’s second approach focuses on the elaboration of the concept of risk-class (see, among others, 2013, 2016, 2018a, 2018b). He effectively argues – with more patience and attention to detail that can be found in Beck’s own writing – that increased exposure to risk under second modernity does not materialise in a political economic context devoid of class relationships but in one where class carves the pathways that structure the intensity of individuals’ exposure to environmental risks’ and their capability to afford ‘escape routes’ from them (2017). Ultimately, Curran’s develops ‘risk-class’ with a view to providing a ‘potential framework to begin to move beyond goods-centric political economy to place the production and distribution of risks alongside goods on an equal footing’ (304). While he is right to correct Beck’s approach which claimed that the rise of risk meant the irrelevance of class, recognising the analytical – and political – significance of risk in and of itself does not necessarily mean the two are of equal significance. More importantly, Curran’s reconciliation of risk and class ultimately replicates the shortcoming of political ecology literature in the sense that class-structured exposure to risks or experience of environmental degradation does not necessarily mean that conflicts arising in response to them will be similarly class centred. In other words, whereas Marx’s theory of class is not only – or, in fact, primarily – intended to account for the creation of inequalities but to account for the mechanism through which they would be transcended (through class conflict), Beck’s theory of risk, even with Curran’s substantial corrections and elaboration, does not come with a similar theory of conflict.

ii. Environmentalism as class politics

On the other side of the equation it is once again possible to identify two streams arguing this time that class is an important factor in environmental politics. The first and arguably the most influential one is also the one that utilizes a non-Marxist conceptualization of class, the post-materialism thesis of Inglehart (1981; Inglehart and Flanagan 1987). The post-materialism literature, which makes extensive use of quantitative data sets such as the World Values Survey and the International Social Survey Program. Given its roots in mainstream political science literature (of the United States), inequalities are not addressed through class but categories such as ‘affluence’. Initially formulated by Inglehart (1981), the central premise of this literature is that concern for the environment only begins to be expressed once more fundamental, ‘material’ needs have been fulfilled. It is asserted that an empirical relationship has been uncovered which shows that ‘ … beginning in the 1960s there has been increasing evidence of a shift in the basic value systems of citizens of advanced industrialized nations. Traditional materialist values have been gradually replaced by higher order, non-economic concerns. These post-materialist values involve appreciation for social equality, participation in decision-making, freedom of expression, and the improvement of the quality of life in general’ (Goksen, Adaman, and Zenginobuz 2002). The clear implication of this position is of course that it is necessary to be rich to be green.

A spate of empirical studies seems to support this thesis, arguing that ‘environmental concern is closely correlated with the wealth of the nations’ (Franzen and Vogl 2013, 1001) and that ‘[p]rogress in economic development results in declining perceived risk and increasing propensity to act’ (Lo 2016, 874). Despite such assertions, the post-materialism thesis has come under rigorous critique, which can be summarized under three headings. First, the empirical studies purporting to show this relationship do not always measure the same effect: ‘environmental concern’ and ‘propensity to act’ are substantially different concepts. Second, the nature of the data – often national or international datasets – obscures the implications of inequalities at the local level on environmental politics as well as the specificities of various environmental issues. Third, and most importantly, however, regardless of the robustness of the empirical tests utilized, these studies fail to account for the countless instances of environmental action by poor communities, not only in the developing but also developed world.

It is this last critique that the ‘varieties of environmentalism’ literature developed by Joan Martinez Alier and his colleagues tackles directly (Martinez Alier and Guha 1997; Anguelovski and Martinez Alier 2014; Martinez Alier 1995). They do not challenge Inglehart’s conceptualization on Marxist grounds per se. Rather they seek to make his concept of environmental politics more complicated. They argue that what Inglehart describes as environmentalism is only one type, which obscures another, arguably more progressive movement. Repositioning Inglehart’s definition of environmentalism as the ‘environmentalism of the rich’, they coin another type, which is the ‘environmentalism of the poor’. The basic argument is that the defence of productive resources mounted by mostly though not exclusively rural communities, peasants as well as indigenous peoples, is also a form of environmentalism. Their argument can be considered to be the most promising theoretical advance to unite class and environmentalism since O’Connor’s articulation of the second contradiction.

In this formulation, the peasantry and indigenous people engage in fights to control their forests, lands or other natural resources can be said to be fighting for the control of the means of production. However, unlike traditional class conflicts where labour struggle to control the means of production (e.g. factory), here the peasantry and indigenous communities are too fighting to control their means of production which happen to be bound up with and comprised of nature itself (an argument that anticipates Moore’s critique of dualism). It is necessary to note that the environmentalism of the poor, with its green on the outside but red inside formulation, is very much a constitutive process of the class that wages it. Put differently, the class position of these actors begins to emerge only when confronted by capital (or its agents in the state) with the threat of transforming existing (possibly non-capitalist) relationship with nature (as it gets transposed into ‘natural resources’ or ‘ecosystem services’). Until this encounter, many such actors exist on the peripheries of capitalism or lead a dual life, where intra-communal relationships are governed by one logic (non-capitalist) and external with another (capitalist). Thus, resistance against the intrusion of capital is not only a resistance against the destruction of nature but also against the logic of capitalism itself.

iii. Bourgeois environmentalism and the ‘new class’

Just as Inglehart is primarily interested in the political consequences of increased affluence, ‘environmentalism of the poor’ is similarly narrowly focused on political responses from a specific segment of society. Despite their theoretical significance, both approaches have been used primarily to document the empirical validity of their perspectives (it is necessary to be rich to be green vs. the poor are also environmentalists) without going further to theorize class broadly. For the post-materialism thesis, this would require also thinking about class relations rather than class positions and for environmentalism of the poor there is a need to go beyond conflictual outcomes. Outside of these, there is a third approach that explicitly engages with the idea of class, though more flexibly. This approach can be seen in at least three different types of arguments that can loosely be seen as economic, cultural and political constructions of class.

The first is demonstrated by the concept of ‘bourgeois environmentalism’, which builds on the Martinez Alier framework. This line of argument has been pursued most effectively by Amita Baviskar (2003; also see Mawdsley, Mehra, and Beazley 2009), who has argued that urban environmental politics in Delhi have come to be dominated by the interests of the ‘bourgeois’ or the ‘upper class’. While the struggle for green spaces might be dominated by bourgeois activists, Baviskar nevertheless maintains that progress of a green agenda is not necessarily ‘antagonistic to working-class interests’ (2003, 95). In other words, bourgeois environmentalists might be seen to be either as playing a temporary leadership role or, alternatively, harking back to the post-class arguments outlined above, certain issues can be expected to result in meaningful alliances between classes even within the vastly unequal contexts as in Delhi’s urban politics.

The second interpretation centres on the political responses that the ‘new social movements’ literature questions (Eckersley 1989). While maintaining the concept of class but looking not at material economic indicators but the cultural forces unleashed by certain constellations of productive relations, it is argued that there is a direct relationship between the rise of environmentally significant behaviours, especially in Western Europe, and the emergence of a ‘new class’ comprised of ‘educated individuals employed in teaching, creative, or caring occupations’ (Giugni and Grasso 2015). To reiterate, class is certainly seen as an important variable but this ‘new class’ occupies an awkward position, reminiscent of Wright’s (1996) understanding of the shifting political positionalities of the middle classes, where they are neither directly in charge of the means of production nor are they (cap)able to move in step with traditional labouring classes.

The third and final formulation, the ‘environmentalism of the malcontent’, aims to make sense of the key qualities of both ‘bourgeois environmentalists’ and the members of the ‘new class’. For Arsel, Akbulut, and Adaman (2015), it is possible to identify a group of activist who arrive at transformative environmental politics not because of their economic class positions but because of their political subjectivities. More specifically, they find that certain activists approach environmental struggles as arenas in which the alliance between state and capital can most effectively targeted. More importantly, however, while their ability to engage in environmentalist struggles is made possible by their class positions (as ‘bourgeois’ or ‘new class’ actors), their willingness emerges from their previous experience in progressive politics for traditional Marxian causes.

While the environmentalism of the malcontent explicitly requires crass-class collaborations (for the ‘malcontent’ do not have sufficient political legitimacy from a strictly ecological stand point), the other two formulations too leave an analytical open door to the possibility of multi-class struggles either because they assume that multiple, otherwise antagonistic classes can be desirous of certain environmental goals or because they do not perceive class antagonisms to play out in their traditional script. Regardless of their formulation, these three approaches are noteworthy because they take the concept of class seriously without an a priori conclusion that transformative environmental struggles need to be zero sum conflicts between competing class interests.

IV. Conflict, progress and the enemy

What, then, is the relationship between climate change conflicts and class in the Anthropocene? More specifically, how do we make analytical sense of the protagonists of emerging and almost certain to intensify conflicts over how best to deal with climate change? The preceding re-reading of broad swaths of literatures demonstrates the analytical difficulty in identifying the protagonists of environmental conflicts in a way that can have purchase across the various spatial, geographical, political and ecological contexts in which conflicts continue to conflagrate. This difficulty in systematizing contemporary (and emerging) environmental conflicts is especially challenging in terms of a Marxist understanding of class positions. Early examples of ecological Marxism, for example the work of O’Connor, have essentially evaded this question. More recently, Moore’s interventions on nature and capitalism has pointed towards the unfeasibility of sustaining the cheap provision of certain ingredients that power global capitalism as the source of an eventual systemic transition. However, since protagonists still need to be social actors (rather than ‘actants’, including nature itself), it is not possible to see natural limits themselves as the drivers of socioeconomic change. Whereas political ecology, especially in its second generation, has focused on actors in a way to prioritise their diversity, agrarian political economy has steadfastly focused on the primacy of the peasantry as the vanguard of resistance against capitalism’s environmental excesses. These are analytically and politically valuable contributions on their own. However, in terms of constructing a broadly applicable theory of environmental conflicts, their sum is less than the parts. The third stream of literature has taken class seriously but without developing a theory of conflict.

In other words, what has remained missing is the linkage between these specific struggles and a broader transformative movement. Absence of a rigorous theory of environmental conflict makes it difficult to conceptualise the pathways away from the environmental crisis of capitalism. In their absence, ‘in the same ship’ narratives come to dominate the intellectual and political landscape and their main utility for their proponents is to advance a win-win ideology that short-circuits the type of drastic changes required to address climate change. The ‘in the same ship’ is negatory in two very different ways, both of which, independently as well as together, stand in stark contrast to a Marxist understanding of social progress whose engine of change is class conflict.

One way of reading the exhortation ‘we are in the same ship’ is to suggest that progress in climate change mitigation and adaptation can be made without conflict. However, even the most cursory reading of history would suggest that the notion of progress has been intrinsically linked to conflict. To take examples from modern capitalist history, the process of decolonisation, fight for racial equality, emancipation of women, and struggle for workers rights have all emerged from conflictual dynamics (that are ongoing). Could it be that climate politics defies this seemingly iron-clad law of history? For the proponents of the ‘in the same ship’ approach, this would either require a deus ex machina technological breakthrough – e.g. CO2 capture mechanisms – that can give a new lease of life for fossil-fuel dependent capitalism. Or the exceptional nature of climate change in the Anthropocene would compel potentially conflictive social groups to put aside their differences to focus single-mindedly on climate change.

The problem with the technocentric solution is not only that investing so much hope into a ‘moonshot’ technological breakthrough is risky in and of itself lest it fails to materialise. It is also that partial advancement of technological breakthroughs do little in terms of dealing with the overall problem and they substantially expand and deepen the capitalism’s environmental limitations since they are guided by the logic of accumulation not sustainability. It is also important to add that taking the ‘moonshot’ analogy literally would also reveal that not only the Soviet but also the US space programme was built by state entities. Incipient attempts at making a Green New Deal in the US or European Green Deal show no such commitment to massive infusion of public funds into responding to climate change, except in terms of defensive gestures aimed primarily to keep anticipated flow of climate refugees out of the European Union and the United States.

The latter – the case in which potentially conflictive social groups would make an (temporary) alliance to battle a shared existential risk – is similarly problematic because those with the grievances are exactly the ones housed in the ‘third class’ of the putative ship. In other words, the ‘same ship’ metaphor contains within itself the implicit expectation that the poor and marginalized communities who have done the least in generating the problem of climate change and who experience some of its worse impacts to suspend their otherwise justified demands for socio-economic justice in order to stave off planetary catastrophe. It is precisely because this is an unlikely scenario, which makes the coupling of ‘same ship’ ideology with climate alarmism dangerous. Accepting the existential threat of climate change without genuine transformative political economic changes can lead to calls for putatively benign authoritarianism as illustrated clearly by no less than the intellectual father of the modern Gaia thesis James Lovelock who argued that since climate change can be seen as analogous to a war, democratic decision making processes would not deliver us the necessary results because another ‘IPCC report won’t be enough. We would argue over it like now’ (Hickman 2010). Instead, he argues, we need ‘a more authoritative world. We've become a sort of cheeky, egalitarian world where everyone can have their say. It's all very well, but there are certain circumstances – a war is a typical example – where you can't do that. You've got to have a few people with authority who you trust who are running it’ (Hickman 2010). In short, in the absence of a major technological breakthrough to diffuse the risks of climate change, the poor and marginalised could end up facing a Hobson’s choice between suspending their claims for socio-economic justice or having their rights usurped by a war-like approach to climate change.

The second negation does not presuppose the elimination of conflict but instead blurs or completely eliminates the notion of an ‘enemy’. In other words, the recognition of the supposed fact of humanity being on the ‘same ship’ could be expected to unleash a transformative struggle to respond to climate change by undertaking the types of political, economic, social and cultural changes required. If humanity is seen as a unity when it comes to its experience of and respond to climate change, it could perhaps struggle with itself. Such an argument is in fact consonant with Beck’s ‘reflexive modernisation’ and, if taken to this logical conclusion, could call for the articulation of novel conceptual scaffolding as suggested by Chakrabarty. However, a call for universal reflexivity would need to go dramatically beyond Beck’s notion of a ‘second modernity’ and instead result in a ‘collective reimagining of our world, or our worlds’ (Wainwright 2020, 211) with a view to achieving global climate justice by building non-capitalist political economies (Mann and Wainwright 2019, 57). The possibility of undertaking such a humanity-wide transformative self-struggle could in a timely and effective manner is supported neither by the trajectory of climate politics so far or by a Marxist reading of history.

When thinking through these two questions – can there be struggle with conflict and can there be conflict without an enemy – within the context of a transition away from climate change in the Anthropocene, it would be useful to note two caveats. The first concerns the ontological unity of the ‘enemy’, especially within an orthodox Marxist view of conflict. While the argument in this paper has been that (agrarian) political economists and political ecologists have not sufficiently theorised the identify of the chief protagonists to reckon with the possibility of their comprising a class unity, there has been even less effort by these scholars on the identity of the putative class enemy. The analytical purchase of an orthodox two-class model could be limited not only because the ‘proletariat’ is not sufficiently homogenous. Even if they were, it could be possible that their enemy, the ‘bourgeoisie’, is too fragmented within the context of climate change in the Anthropocene. Recognizing that the sole objective of capital is to reproduce itself, it would be possible to expect fundamental conflict amongst different economic sectors and capitalists operating within them.

This leads to the second caveat that to the extent that questioning the class-nature of climate conflicts within the Anthropocene makes it possible to highlight some key analytical dimensions, a full reckoning with the question needs to be situated within a much broader empirical terrain. In other words, reducing the Anthropocene to its arguably most spectacular instance can blur away the broader tensions inherent in the relationship between nature, society and capital. To this end, it is also important to recognize that climate change might not be an ontological unity and instead the summation of the changes of the myriad interconnected ecological dynamics with extremely difficult to predict feedback loops. In inquiring into the class nature of climate conflicts, therefore, it would be important to look beyond isolated instances in the short term and develop generative analytical approaches that can focus on the global and the long-duree.

V. Who will blow up the pipeline?

In conclusion, although (agrarian) political economy and political ecology have done much to advance our understanding of environmental conflicts including those concerned with climate change, the two provocations by O’Connor and Chakrabarty remain unanswered. On the one hand, fidelity to Marxist class analysis – broadly construed but anchored in concrete materialism – would help retheorize some of the existing experiences of resistance especially in the developing world, not just by rethinking how to apprehend the identity of the protagonists but also by reconsidering the nature of their demands by recognizing that struggle against capitalist development and its environmental excesses are not necessarily tantamount to the abandonment of emancipatory material development nor a retreat into a type of eco-medievalism. Such a task would therefore necessitate a broader rethinking of the analytical function of class also in cognate fields, especially development studies (Arsel and Dasgupta 2015). On the other hand, it bears repeating that fidelity to Marxist class analysis does not require a rigid two-class framework, the erasure of genuine cross-class formations, or the possibility that additional conceptual tools might need to be developed to respond to the exigencies of climate change in the Anthropocene.

The increasing recognition that climate change is no longer a distant and potential outcome but very much concrete reality in our time coupled with mounting political angst concerning the resilience of business as usual approaches to national and global governance has recently, and perhaps unsurprisingly, engendered discussions around the necessity of more direct and potentially violent actions to bring about the needed socio-economic transformations (for e.g. Malm 2021; Wainwright 2020). In a recent commentary Battistoni (2022) has argued that Malm’s ‘How to blow up a pipeline?’ is not so much a discussion of ‘how’ but ‘why’. It could be added that ‘who will blow up the pipeline?’ is also an important question awaiting an answer. Doing so – in both practical as well as analytical terms – requires the urgent development of a Marxist theory of environmental conflict in the Anthropocene.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the productive feedback of the anonymous referees and JPS editorial team. I would also like to thank colleagues who have read previous drafts or engaged with the core arguments of the paper, including Fikret Adaman, Bill Adams, Anirban Dasgupta, Wendy Harcourt, Jessica Hope and Lorenzo Pellegrini.

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Murat Arsel

Murat Arsel is Professor of Political Economy at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam. The overall focus of his research is on the relationship between capitalism, nature and society. He is currently working on several different strands of research, including unburnable fuels, infrastructure and authoritarian developmentalism, and climate conflicts in cities at the frontlines of sea level rise such as Jakarta and Miami.