Capitalism Nature Socialism

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Global Capitalism, Reactionary Neoliberalism, and

the Deepening of Environmental Injustices

Daniel Faber

To cite this article: Daniel Faber (2018) Global Capitalism, Reactionary Neoliberalism, and
the Deepening of Environmental Injustices, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 29:2, 8-28, DOI:
10.1080/10455752.2018.1464250

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Published online: 14 Jun 2018.

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CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM
2018, VOL. 29, NO. 2, 8–28
https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2018.1464250

HOUSE ORGAN

Global Capitalism, Reactionary Neoliberalism, and the

Deepening of Environmental Injustices

Introduction
The systemic crisis of neoliberal capitalism is not only economic and ecological in
nature, as is manifest in the explosive growth in global economic and ecological
inequalities, but is also witnessed as a growing crisis of legitimacy for traditional
political parties and ruling power structures that have long controlled the system.
The political manifestations of this crisis can be seen everywhere, especially in the
United States with the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency (Faber et al.
2017). It is also witnessed by the rise of authoritarian and proto-fascist forces in
Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific; the growing power of racist, anti-immigrant
parties in Italy, and northern and east-central Europe; and the weakening legiti-
macy of European labor and social democratic parties (and the challenges to the
European Union itself, as seen in UK’s Brexit). The larger, system-wide crisis of
global capitalism is spawning a new subjective political voice in the form of reac-
tionary populism. Termed xenophobic authoritarianism by Inglehart and Norris,
reactionary populism discourse typically
favors mono-culturalism over multiculturalism, national self-interest over
international cooperation and development aid, closed borders over the free
flow of people, ideas, labor and capital, and traditionalism over progressive
and liberal social values. Hence Trump’s rhetoric seeks to stir up a potent
mix of racial resentment, intolerance of multiculturalism, nationalistic isola-
tionism, nostalgia for past glories, mistrust of outsiders, traditional misogyny
and sexism, the appeal of forceful strong-man leadership, attack-dog politics,
and racial and anti-Muslim animus. (Inglehart and Norris 2016, 7)
As such, Trump’s presidency represents the ascendancy of an even more hard-
nosed brand of capitalism.
The rise of rightwing populism is a response to the failures of what Nancy
Ingehart and Norris (2017) terms “progressive” neoliberalism to provide ade-
quate economic security to broad swaths of the world’s working and middle
classes. In the United States progressive neoliberalism was predicated in good
part on an uneasy alliance between Wall Street, the Democratic Party, and
many of the more mainstream organizations within new social movements
working on feminism, environmentalism, multiculturalism, antiracism, and
LGBTQIA issues. This uneasy alliance revolved around an economic agenda

© 2018 The Center for Political Ecology

 CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 9

for the deregulation of the banks and financialization of the economy, free trade
agreements, a rollback of the welfare state and some environmental measures, and
the projection of U.S. military power abroad. Both the Clinton and Obama
administrations famously co-opted mainstream environmentalists and engaged
in preemptive “containment” of costly and far-reaching environmental policy
proposals. Both administrations sought accommodation with the environmental
and environmental justice (EJ) movements by allowing limited victories in
specific instances of high-profile public mobilization. In exchange the polluter-
industrial complex would be rewarded with weaker regulations, generous subsi-
dies and access to energy and other natural resources on federal lands, and
other forms of economic compensation. These concessions to industry often
came at the expense of other battles being waged by grassroots environmental
organizations around the country.
The strategy of the Clinton/Obama neoliberals was to enlist the support of the
business-friendly organizations in the ecology movement around a number of
highly symbolic policy proposals, and thus give Democrats the appearance of
being pro-environment. The actual progressive segments of the movement
were split off. For instance, President Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Develop-
ment was stacked with executives from some of the worst polluters in the country,
along with conservative environmentalists such as Jay Hair of the National Wild-
life Federation, Fred Krupp of the Environmental Defense Fund, John Sawhill of
the Nature Conservancy, and John Adams of the Natural Resources Development
Council. All are noted for their cooperation with industry and support for the
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which most of the environ-
mental and EJ movements opposed. By manipulating the pro-corporate elements
of the movement, the Clinton and Obama administrations operated in concert
with a conservative Congress and the polluter-industrial complex to introduce
more flexible, market-oriented and “cost-effective” neoliberal policy approaches
over the “command and control” typical of the liberal regime of regulation.
Trump is now rewriting these rules of engagement. Under a progressive neo-
liberal regime of environmental regulation, tackling climate change would require
an alliance between the state and the environmental movement in supporting the
adoption of carbon trading and the commodification of pollution. But Under
Trump and a reactionary neoliberal regime of environmental deregulation, the
state now acts in opposition to the movement, denies the science of climate
change, and pulls out of the Paris Climate Accords, at least in the United
States. Similarly, under a progressive neoliberal regime, meritocratic policy
approaches could be adopted ensuring that “talented” women, racial and ethnic
minorities, and members of the LGBTQIA community are not discriminated
against in labor markets, or even murdered, and can rise into higher class
status hierarchies based upon their abilities. In a reactionary neoliberal policy
regime, a full frontal assault is initiated on the rights and status of these same
groups in order to protect the privileges of white males. It is therefore no accident
that the greatest support of rightwing populism is grounded in older generations,
men, the less educated, ethnic majorities, wealthy suburbanites and the petty
bourgeoisie, and to a lesser degree among those class strata experiencing
10 D. FABER

greater unemployment—populations that are susceptible to the rightwing propa-

ganda machines that present women, immigrants, and minorities as the primary
threats to their economic security (Inglehart and Norris 2016, 4; and Faber et al.
2017). Only by restructuring the policy aims of new social movements into more
meritocratic and market-oriented policy approaches compatible with the restruc-
turing of American capitalism could the more harmful economic impacts
(especially on labor) of progressive neoliberalism be initiated (Fraser 2017, 3).
Under Trump, these movements are now on the outside of the reactionary neo-
liberal hegemonic power bloc currently in control of the state, and are the subjects
of attack and ridicule.
Now that he is in office, Trump has largely abandoned the more populist econ-
omic dimensions of his campaign platform (the imposition of tariffs on steel and
some other imports aside), and has instead embraced a more hyper-reactionary
neoliberal politics. Reactionary neoliberalism aims to continue to expand the
power and profits of not only finance capital, but also the polluter- and mili-
tary-industrial complexes. It is fundamentally about deepening the redistribution
of wealth to the owners, managers and—to a minimal degree—the workers, of the
big banks on Wall Street, defense contractors such as General Dynamics and
Raytheon, the Koch Brothers and petrochemical giants. Former CEOs, lobbyists,
and policymakers from these sectors of American business now dominate the
Trump administration on every level. Facilitated by renewed calls for big expan-
sions in funding for the military and Homeland Security (militarization), greater
rollbacks of governmental regulatory “interference” with business practices
(deregulation), further takeovers of former public services and state agencies by
domestic and/or transnational capital (privatization), reductions in social
welfare and environmental budgets at the state and federal levels (fiscal conserva-
tism), and rollbacks of civil liberties and human rights (political repression), the
reactionary neoliberal agenda currently being advanced by the Right is at the
heart of an unprecedented frontal assault on the past gains and goals of environ-
mentalists, EJ and climate justice activists, and other social movements.
This attack is being echoed in other parts of the world, and is accelerating the
appropriation of nature by capital on a global scale. World labor forces, natural
resources and energy supplies, technology and machinery, genetic material and
biosystems, and other “productive inputs” are becoming economically integrated
into the circuits of global capital and the organizational structures of transna-
tional corporations and banks. The heightened geographic mobility of global
capital grants polluting corporations the capacity to locate production facilities
in virtually every corner of the planet and take advantage of the less stringent
environmental regulations and more profitable business climate afforded by
this reactionary neoliberal agenda (Li and Zhou 2017). As a result, climate
change and the global ecological crisis are getting worse. And in the new world
economy, because the widespread adoption of Export-Oriented Industrialization
(EOI), economic programs throughout the world and the increased mobility of
capital have rendered domestic and world export markets more competitive.
Cost minimization strategies lie at the heart of global business strategies for
 CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 11

profit maximization, and are rendering the anti-ecological dynamics of capital

accumulation more acute.
Generally speaking, from the United States perspective there are two mechan-
isms related to the ecological crisis—one domestic, the other international—by
which capital is reducing costs, increasing efficiency, and facilitating capital
accumulation. First of all, in the United States and the global North, capital is
responding to threats posed by the growth of low-cost imports from foreign com-
petitors, as well as the need to boost the competitiveness of its exports abroad, by
reducing the costs of doing business inside their home countries. Along with labor
costs, environmental protection measures are considered by many “dirty” indus-
tries to be some of the most burdensome. Companies therefore seek to protect
profits not only by “downsizing” the labor force but also by cutting “unproductive
expenditures” on pollution control equipment, environmental conservation, and
worker health and safety. Simply put, the key to cost containment lies in processes
of capital restructuring that enables corporations to extract greater value from
labor power and nature in less time and at a lower cost (i.e. to increase the rate
of exploitation of labor and nature). Under the reactionary neoliberal regimes
this entails launching a renewed domestic political assault on the EJ movement,
trade unions, environmentalists, and other progressive social movements in
order to contain wages and benefits, cut back on worker and public health and
safety laws, dump more pollution into the environment, engage in more destruc-
tive and “extreme” forms of dirty energy and natural resource extraction, con-
tinue to burn fossil fuels and release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere,
and place cancer-causing chemicals in our food, water, and consumer products.
But not all people are equally impacted by these social and ecological costs of
capitalist accumulation. In order to bolster profits and competitiveness, capital
and the neoliberal state embrace various strategies for displacing negative
environmental “externalities” that are simultaneously the most economically effi-
cient and politically expedient. Most citizens see the act of releasing dangerous
toxins into the air and water as a form of anti-social behavior, a violation of
their most fundamental human rights to a clean and healthy environment. Resi-
dents will seldom “choose” to see their family members or neighbors poisoned by
industrial pollution, especially if they are aware of the dangers. In fact, the suc-
cessful imposition of such public health dangers is symptomatic of a lack of
democracy and the ideological hegemony of the polluter-industrial complex.
Once aware of the dangers, affected residents are likely to oppose the offending
operation. As a result, capital adopts more cost-effective practices for exploiting
natural resources and disposing of pollutants that offer the path of least political
resistance.
Following the path of least resistance often means targeting the most disem-
powered communities in society for the most ecologically hazardous industrial
facilities, toxic waste sites, and destructive forms of natural resource extraction
and energy development. The less political power a community of people pos-
sesses; the fewer resources (time, money, education) the people in that commu-
nity have to defend themselves from potential threats; the lower the level of
community awareness and mobilization against potential ecological threats, the
12 D. FABER

more likely they are to experience arduous environmental and human health pro-
blems. The weight of the ecological burden upon a community depends upon the
balance of power between capital, the state, and social movements responding to
the needs and demands of the populace. In capitalist countries such as the United
States, it is working-class neighborhoods, ethnic minorities, and poor commu-
nities of color that most often experience the worst problems. Environmental
inequality is now increasing faster than income inequality in the United States
(Boyce, Zwickl, and Ash 2014).
Similar to the “domestic” strategy of reducing production costs by displacing
ecological and public health hazards onto poor people of color and the white
working class inside the United States and other countries of the global North,
corporations also reduce costs by adopting the “international” strategy of export-
ing ecological hazards outside America’s national boundaries (Pellow 2007; Faber
2008). The worsening ecological crisis in the global South is directly related to an
international system of economic and environmental stratification in which the
United States and other advanced capitalist nations are able to shift or impose
the environmental burden on weaker states (Adeloa 2000; Li and Zhou 2017).
In fact, one of the primary aims of the neoliberal agenda is to facilitate the displa-
cement of externalities by capital onto poorer nations.
The export of ecological hazards to the global South reflects the economic logic
of neoliberal policymakers aligned with the interests of transnational corpor-
ations, which deems human life in the global South worth much less than in
the North. If the poor and underemployed masses of Africa become sick or die
from exposure to pollution produced by domestic capital or exported from the
North, it will have a much smaller impact on the profits of international
capital. Aside from the higher costs of pollution-abatement in the advanced capi-
talist countries, if highly skilled and well-compensated workers in the global
North fall prey to environmentally related health problems, the expense to
capital and the state can be significant. Similarly, if African Americans living in
Flint, Michigan are so devalued that their “premature deaths” do not constitute
a cost to the capitalist system, neoliberal policymakers will remain indifferent
to the public health abuses inflicted on the community by lead poisoning
(Pulido 2016, 2). Although morally reprehensible, under the global capitalist
system it pays for business to shift pollution onto poor communities and
countries. And this is precisely the goal of neoliberals dominating global power
structures.
Given the willingness of neoliberal governments in the global South to trade-
off environmental protection in favor of capital investment and accumulation, the
growing mobility of capital (in all forms) is facilitating the export of ecological
problems from the advanced capitalist countries to the global South and sub-per-
ipheral states. This export of ecological hazard from the United States and other
Northern countries to the less-developed countries takes place as the following:
(1) in the money circuit of global capital, in the form of foreign direct investment
(FDI) in domestically owned hazardous industries, as well as destructive invest-
ment schemes to gain access to new oil fields, forests, agricultural lands,
mining deposits, and other natural resources; (2) in the productive circuit of
 CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 13

global capital, with the relocation of polluting and environmentally hazardous

production processes and polluting facilities owned by transnational capital to
the global South; (3) in the commodity circuit of global capital, as witnessed in
the marketing of more profitable but also more dangerous foods, drugs, pesti-
cides, technologies, and other consumer/capital goods; and (4) in the “waste
circuit” of global capital, with the dumping in the global South of toxic wastes, pol-
lution, discarded consumer products, trash, and other commodified and non-
commodified forms of “anti-wealth” produced by Northern industry. In effect,
international capital is appropriating ecological carrying capacity for the core
by transferring (“distancing”) externalities to the global South (Frey 2003). As
in the United States, it is the poorest and most politically repressed people in
the South that bear the greatest brunt of the global ecological crisis.
In the age of reactionary neoliberalism susceptibility to the “negative external-
ities” of global capital is ever more deeply related to social positionality, that is, to
where a person or group of people are situated in multiple power structures cen-
tered on class, gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship, and more (Walker 2012). The
various social positions or “identities” held in these power structures intersect to
create different social “axes” of advantage and disadvantage. A poor working-
class African-American woman in the United States encounters multiple disad-
vantages in comparison to the control capacity exercised by a white, middle-
class woman (or male) in Sweden. A poor woman that is part of the Ogoni
ethnic minority living in the Niger Delta of Nigeria is even more disadvantaged.
In the United States communities that lack control capacity over political-
economic power structures are typically made up of racial and ethnic minorities,
as well as the white working class (Schnaiberg 1994). For instance, rural white
women and their families in Appalachia are especially harmed by extractive
energy schemes such as coal mining (Bell 2013). For those members of the socially
and spatially segregated “underclass,” powerlessness is even more pervasive.
America’s undocumented immigrants, Chicano farmers, indigenous peoples,
and other dispossessed people of color are the ones being selectively victimized
to the greatest extent by environmental health abuses (Johnston 1994). As part
of the country’s subaltern experiencing multiple forms of political domination,
economic exploitation, and cultural oppression, they are effectively devalued in
American society (Pulido 1996). The resulting environmental injustices take
the form of noxious industrial pollutants and hazardous waste sites being situated
in poor African-American communities in the rural South (Bullard 1994; Holi-
field, Chakraborty, and Walker 2017), or of undocumented Mexican workers
laboring in the pesticide-soaked agricultural fields of California, Texas, and
Florida (Berkey 2017). In short, the concentration of environmental and health
hazards among the subaltern is creating ecological sacrifice zones—areas where
it is simply dangerous to breathe the air or take a drink of water (Lerner 2010).
As such, ecological sacrifice zones serve as locations where capital can substan-
tially lower or ignore the costs of compliance with environmental regulations.
In this light, environmental injustices are rooted in power structures and
models of capital accumulation that confer social class advantages and racial/
gender privileges (Sicotte 2016, 13). And when analyzing environmental
14 D. FABER

inequality, we should be aware that there are multiple political-economic forces at

work that give the injustice a particular context and form (Holifield 2001). In the
United States and the world economy racism is a “constituent logic” of capitalism
and, as stated by Pulido, “creates a variegated landscape that cultures and capital
can exploit to create enhanced power and profits” (Pulido 2016, 7; see also Ran-
ganathan 2016). As we shall see, environmental racism facilitates capital accumu-
lation in a variety of critically important ways, and is central to the reactionary
neoliberal project. As a result, poorer people of color face a “quadruple exposure
effect” to environmental health hazards.
This first takes the form of higher rates of “on the job” exposure to dangerous
substances used in the production process inside the factory; and the second con-
sists in greater exposure to toxic pollutants in the community outside the factory
(Morello-Froch 1997). Faulty cleanup efforts implemented by the government or
the waste treatment industry often magnify these problems (Lavelle and Coyle
1992; O’Neil 2005). Poorer communities, women, and people of color also face
greater dislocation, health problems, and loss of livelihood as a result of energy
and natural resource extraction (Martinez-Alier 2002; Bell 2013). The final
piece to the quadruple exposure effect comes in the form of greater exposure
to toxic chemicals in the household, commercial foods, and a variety of consumer
products. As demonstrated in the case of Flint, Michigan, neoliberal policy cost-
cutting measures continue to be a leading health threat to children, particularly
poor children and children of color living in older, dilapidated housing with
lead pipes (Pulido 2016). Black children are now five times more likely than
white children to have lead poisoning. Taken together, it is clear that racial capit-
alism is causing people of color to experience a disparate exposure to environ-
mental hazards where they “work, live, and play” (Alston 1990).
Below I will quickly sketch out five processes by which reactionary neoliberal
capitalism is likely to exacerbate environmental injustices in the United States: (1)
by further promoting the mobility of ecologically hazardous industries into com-
munities of color and white working-class neighborhoods; (2) by restricting the
ability of the subaltern to move out of dangerous areas for safer neighborhoods;
(3) by facilitating the dislocation of the subaltern from ecologically revitalized
communities; (4) by limiting the ability of workers of color to leave dangerous
jobs for safer occupations; and (5) by facilitating the appropriation of land and
resources by global capital in a manner detrimental to the subaltern and
popular class formations. Although my focus here is on the United States, it
should be remembered that environmental injustices are being displaced in a
very similar manner onto disempowered communities in neoliberal nations
across the globe.

Promoting the Mobility of Ecologically Hazardous Capital to Move

into Disempowered Communities
Following the path of least resistance often leads capital and the state to target
white working-class communities and oppressed communities of color for the
siting of hazardous industrial facilities and waste sites. That “disempowered”
 CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 15

communities are to serve as such a pollution haven is often blatantly advertised.

As early as 1984 a commissioned report by Cerrell Associates for the California
Waste Management Board, for instance, openly recommended that industry
and the state locate waste incinerators (or “waste-to-energy facilities”) in neigh-
borhoods of “lower socioeconomic” status:
Members of middle or higher-socioeconomic strata (a composite index of level
of education, occupational prestige, and income) are more likely to organize
into effective groups to express their political interests and views. All socioeco-
nomic groupings tend to resent the nearby siting of major [polluting] facilities,
but the middle and upper-socioeconomic strata possess better resources to
affectuate their opposition. Middle and higher-socioeconomic strata neighbor-
hoods should not fall at least within the one-mile and five-mile radii of the pro-
posed site. (California Waste Management Board 1984, 42–43)
The Cerrell Associates report also makes note of research indicating that commu-
nities made up of residents that are low-income, Catholic, Republican and/or
conservative in political affiliation, of a low educational level, mostly senior citi-
zens, and/or located the South and Midwest of the United States, tend to exercise
less control capacity over the siting of major polluting facilities.
California now has the highest concentration of racial/ethnic minorities living
near incinerators and other commercial hazardous waste treatment, storage, and
disposal facilities (TSDFs). In Greater Los Angeles, for instance, some 1.2 million
people live in close proximity (less than two miles) to seventeen such facilities,
and 91 percent of them (1.1 million) are people of color (Bullard et al. 2007,
58–60). Of course, the question remains: which came first, the city’s [Los Ange-
les’s] most polluted neighborhoods or minority residents? Studies sponsored by
the California Policy Research Center looked at the character of an area before
a TSDF siting and the demographic and other shifts that occurred in the years
after a siting. The findings indicate that since the 1970s the neighborhoods tar-
geted to house toxic storage and disposal facilities have more minority, poor,
and blue-collar populations than areas that did not receive TSDFs (Pastor,
Sadd, and Hipp 2001).
California is not alone when it comes to concentrating environmental pro-
blems in racially segregated communities. Neoliberal policy and traditional
environmental laws require capital to contain pollution sources for more
proper treatment and disposal. Once the pollution is “trapped,” treatment and
disposal are paid for by the manufacturing industry. The waste, now commodi-
fied, becomes mobile, crossing local, state, and even national borders in search
of areas where it will be dealt with cheaply. All across the United States
working-class neighborhoods and poor communities of color have been repeat-
edly targeted by capital and the state for the siting of hazardous facilities.
Under the leadership of former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Admin-
istrator William Ruckelshaus the waste management company Browning-Ferris
Industries (BFI) earned enormous profits (more than $1.6 billion in 1986
alone) through an industry-wide modus operandi that kept costs down and
profits high by locating the more dangerous facilities in neighborhoods of color
16 D. FABER

within such cities as Birmingham, San Antonio, and Houston. Practices of

environmental racism by BFI, Chemical Waste Management, and other titans
of waste became rampant in the 1980s–1990s and fueled the growth of the EJ
movement. The process continues today, accelerating in connection with
Trump’s assault on the EPA and their EJ programs. For the first time in
history, people of color now comprise the majority of the population (56
percent) living near the nation’s commercial hazardous waste facilities. African
Americans are also 79 percent more likely than whites to live in neighborhoods
where industrial pollution is suspected of posing the greatest health danger
(Bullard et al. 2007).
Neighborhoods undergoing rapid ethnic, racial, and class-based transitions (or
“churning”) are often the most vulnerable. Towns experiencing “white flight” to
the suburbs and a corresponding demographic shift toward newly arrived Latino
or Asian immigrants, for instance, often lack the tight community networks, pol-
itical connections, and social capital necessary to mobilize residents to oppose
ecologically hazardous facilities. Communities composed in a fragmented
manner by peoples of different racial, ethnic, religious, national-origin identities,
class backgrounds, and languages can also be more vulnerable to the “divide and
conquer” strategies of capital. That said, many poor but homogenous commu-
nities of color have strong civic institutions (such as the Church) that build
social solidarity and support long histories of struggle on behalf of civil rights.
As such, and in contrast to the assumptions of the Cerrell Report, they can
pose formidable opposition to corporate polluters (Rinquist 1997). Only those
economically depressed communities that are burdened by poverty, high unem-
ployment, and a marginal tax base will feel compelled to accept hazardous facili-
ties. Such a trade-off is sometimes made in view of the attendant potential for job
creation, enhanced tax revenues and the provision of social services, and other
economic benefits. In contrast, communities with a strong economic base and
a high degree of control capacity over the decision-making processes of local gov-
ernment officials and business leaders are better able to block the introduction of
environmental hazards (Gould 1991).
It is important to focus on the systemic political-economic drivers of capital
mobility by dirty industry into disempowered communities over the more
narrow, legalistic definitions that emphasize corporate “intentions” to discrimi-
nate. It is not necessarily anyone’s intention to inflict harm upon working-class
whites or people of color when siting hazardous operations. The primary goal
of capital is instead to seek out the cheap land, favorable zoning laws, less regu-
lation, good infrastructure, and a community less likely to offer opposition (Wol-
verton 2012). However, it is the legacy of systemic racism and class exploitation
that creates such self-reinforcing social conditions in any given community. For
instance, ethnic and racial minorities in the community may have been discrimi-
nated against by the banks, reducing home ownership; educational segregation
may have left the community’s residents undereducated, producing not just
“white flight” but “class flight,” as well and leaving those remaining behind
much less equipped to challenge a hazardous siting; economic discrimination
may have forced residents into low-wage service jobs, requiring many to work
 CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 17

multiple jobs and thus reducing overall civic involvement that forms the basis of
any public efforts to resist a toxic hazard; economic deprivation further makes the
promise of a handful of (dangerous) new jobs in the community difficult to resist;
racist voter redistricting and gerrymandering (the redrawing of political district
boundaries to favor a Party in power) may have robbed the community of politi-
cal power; and racist law enforcement and prosecution might have incarcerated a
whole generation of people who would otherwise have the energy and drive to
oppose such predations on their homes and families. These structural and sys-
temic political-economic conditions of racial capitalism make it logical for pollut-
ing industry to locate operations in poor communities of color and to do so
without being overtly racist.

Restricting the Mobility of the Subaltern Out of Ecologically

Hazardous Communities
Reactionary neoliberalism is likely to deepen environmental injustices by initiat-
ing measures that further prevent the mobility of the subaltern out of environ-
mentally contaminated communities. The Trump coalition of wealthy white
citizens tend to exercise greater control over community planning processes,
including the “exclusionary zoning” of dirty industries and other locally
unwanted land uses (LULUs). Wealthier citizens can also better afford to out-
migrate (white flight) and purchase access to nicer neighborhoods, better
schools and housing, ecological amenities, and a cleaner environment (South
and Crowder 1997), suggesting that lower-income households and people of
color are more likely to be “left behind” in areas with hazardous facilities
(Banzhaf 2008). As stated by Sicotte (2016, 39),
[the] affluent can mobilize their economic power to secure environmental pri-
vilege for themselves, which can include tasking other communities with dis-
posing of their waste; restricting the access of others to “natural” or beautiful
spaces; buffering such spaces from development or industrialization; and enjoy-
ing the convenience of living in centrally located places from which the less
affluent have been priced out.
Wealthy whites can also employ various tactics for excluding people of color and
poorer whites from escaping hazardous communities by moving into their neigh-
borhoods. The ability of poor people of color and ethnic minorities to migrate to
“greener” pastures is limited by their lower incomes, zoning and urban planning
policies, regressive taxation, and discriminatory housing and mortgage lending
(redlining) practices (Taylor 2014; Sicotte 2016, 39). Dating back to the National
Housing Act of 1924, there is a disturbing historical pattern of mortgage lending
in the United States that serves to reproduce highly segregated patterns of resi-
dential location by race/ethnicity (Oliver and Shapiro 1995; Taylor 2014). Just
a handful of towns in Massachusetts, for instance, account for the majority of
loans given to African Americans and Latinos. Just four communities typically
receive more than half of all home-purchase loans given to African Americans,
while five other communities receive more than half of all home-purchase
18 D. FABER

loans for Latinos (Campen 2004). All of these communities except one are ranked
among the 30 most environmentally overburdened communities in Massachu-
setts (Faber and Krieg 2005). In addition, African Americans and Latinos at all
income levels are more than twice as likely to be rejected for a home-purchase
mortgage loan than are white applicants at the same income levels. Recent
studies show that white Americans are increasingly choosing to self-segregate
into racially isolated ethnoburbs, insulating themselves from the social and
environmental injustices plaguing communities of color (Kye 2014).
Racial and ethnic segregation in the United States is a product of the manner in
which real estate developers, bankers, industrialists, and other sectors of capital
work in coalition with government officials (at all levels) to form policy and plan-
ning structures which promote community development conducive to these
business interests, i.e. local growth machines (Logan and Molotch 1987). It
pays these interests to displace environmental health problems onto these com-
munities where most residents lack health care insurance, have lower incomes
and own less valuable property, and are more easily replaced in the labor
market if they become sick or die. Again, in the case of the organized economic
abandonment of Flint, Michigan, neoliberal policymakers implement additional
austerity measures that further worsen the environmental and public health pro-
blems in these communities. In Flint this involved changing the source of drink-
ing water for the city to the highly polluted Flint River, which was so corrosive
that it caused lead to leak en masse from the pipes into the public water system
(Pulido 2016; Ranganathan 2016). Such externalities displaced upon the
working poor are less likely to impose costs on capital and the larger economic
system than if such harm was inflicted on the professional classes in whom sig-
nificant investments of social capital are made. The siting of ecologically hazar-
dous industrial facilities in communities of color, as well as “minority move-
ins” to already heavily polluted areas, are both governed by the same systemic
logic of capitalist accumulation (Been and Gupta 1997). Such acts of environ-
mental racism are perfectly rational from the perspective of capital and neoliberal
policy planners overseeing organized abandonment.

Dislocating the Subaltern from Ecologically Revitalized Communities

Under the Trump administration, and with the implementation of reactionary
neoliberal urban redevelopment schemes, we are likely to witness an accelerated
dislocation of people of color and working-class whites from economically and
ecologically revitalized neighborhoods and communities (Faber and Kimelberg
2014). Neoliberal urban sustainability initiatives and community redevelopment
projects that create open space or otherwise aim to improve the environmental
profile of a neighborhood can trigger increases in real estate prices, rents, and
property taxes, leading to the economic displacement of the existing residents
who had endured the deleterious effects of pollution and ecological degradation
(Banzhaf and McCormick 2012). At the same time, the cleanup and revitalization
of neighborhoods can result in what Marcuse (1986) termed “exclusionary displa-
cement,” rendering the sustainable city inaccessible for future residents of limited
 CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 19

economic means. Housing price increases hit the poor—the vast majority of
whom are renters—especially hard. It is typically only landlords and homeowners
who stand to capture the property value gains associated with gentrification
(Banzhaf and McCormick 2012).
Environmental gentrification (Sieg et al. 2004) is quickly becoming the major
issue impacting low-income residents and people of color in cities across the
United States. The elimination of environmental disamenities (such as toxic
waste sites) and the creation of environmental amenities (such as parks) can
exact a large economic toll on vulnerable residents (Gamper-Rabindran and
Timmins 2011; Curran and Hamilton 2012). Black and Latino populations
often decrease significantly after the revitalization of land contaminated with
toxic chemicals (Essoka 2010). Similarly, as Gould and Lewis (2012) revealed,
the restoration of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in the 1990s led to a significant
increase in new construction around the park and a corresponding decrease in
the racial and socioeconomic diversity of those areas. In many cases the displaced
residents migrate to more environmentally distressed parts of the city where
housing costs are lower (Banzhaf and McCormick 2012, 39–41).
It is clear that a failure to adequately address the social justice dimensions of
urban sustainability initiatives can contribute to environmental gentrification
(Pearsall 2012). Such a failure is typically grounded in “asymmetrical power
relations … [that] continually influence how and what kinds of ‘environmental’
issues are addressed” (Tretter 2013, 308). The threats posed by gentrification
are now presenting the EJ movement with a pernicious paradox (Checker
2011). Are successful EJ struggles by the working class and people of color to
make their urban environments greener likely to yield unintended consequences
in the form of the eventual displacement and relocation of these same residents
into other polluted communities, where rents and housing prices are cheaper?
Must lower-income residents “reject environmental amenities in their neighbor-
hood in order to resist gentrification that tends to follow … ” (Checker 2011,
211)?
Neoliberal urban revitalization and green development schemes are only going
to exacerbate social dislocations of this sort. Banzhaf and McCormick (2012, 39-
41) conclude that although there are exceptions, “the evidence seems clear that in
most cases improvements in local environmental conditions do trigger increases
in property prices.” For example, the cleanup of Superfund and other brownfield
sites—and in some cases, even the anticipation of future remediation—results in
rising land values, housing values and/or rents (Gamper-Rabindran and Timmins
2013; Pearsall 2012). The “greening” of urban space brings new retail stores, res-
taurants, and amenities explicitly targeted toward middle- and upper-class resi-
dents. This remaking of the commercial and social aspects of neighborhoods
can serve to alienate or marginalize lower-income residents, and especially the
homeless (Dooling 2012), not only because participation is cost-prohibitive to
those with limited means, but also because it serves to reinforce racial and
class-based symbolic and social boundaries within the community (Lamont
and Molnar 2002). The task before the EJ movement is to tear down these bound-
aries and develop a new politics of urban sustainability that unites struggles
20 D. FABER

around affordable housing, green jobs at a living wage, civil and migrant rights,
ecological revitalization, and economic development into a larger body politics
that serves the interest of low-income residents and people of color.

Restricting the Mobility of the Subaltern Out of Ecologically

Hazardous Occupations
Similar to mainstream environmental policy, worker health and safety programs
can add to the costs of capital and restrict or prevent the use of more profitable
(and more hazardous) chemical substances, materials, and production processes.
Industries under stronger competitive pressures from low-cost operations over-
seas are especially eager to avoid “internalizing” costs on such “unproductive
expenditures” as worker health and safety, and will instead displace (or “externa-
lize”) these costs onto their labor force in the form of dangerous working con-
ditions and exposure to health hazards (Morgenson 2005). According to the
International Labour Organization (ILO), work-related injuries, illnesses and
stress, and the resultant workers’ disengagement are estimated to cost the
United States economy more than $2.2 trillion per year (WEF 2017). Some 150
workers die every day from hazardous working conditions (AFL-CIO 2017).
Not all workers face the same level of health threats on the job. Highly skilled
workers are more essential to many businesses and are not so easily replaced if
they become injured or sick, and are therefore provided greater protection by
industry and unions. As a result, unskilled and semi-skilled blue-collar workers
involved in manufacturing, construction, logging, and agriculture face greater
occupational hazards on the job. Workers in these industries are more “expend-
able,” as they are more easily replaced by other people if an injury or death occurs.
In fact, economic damages awarded in tort law are in large part based on wage
loss. A restaurant worker earning a low hourly wage is simply “worth” far less
than a highly experienced and well-paid company manager. Since the usual
penalty for inflicting environmental and/or occupational disease is the “restitu-
tion” of the injured through the payment of compensatory fines rather than crim-
inal penalties or confiscatory fines, the costs almost never approach the economic
advantages that accrue to companies that perpetrate injury and death upon
workers. In other words, it can be cheaper to use unsafe technology, poisonous
chemicals, and dangerous production processes that kill or maim unskilled
workers and pay the fine than to make the workplace safe (Eligman and
Bohme 2005).
As with pollution and other ecological hazards, capital’s imposition of occu-
pational health and safety dangers upon labor is often met with resistance from
workers. The path of least resistance for capital is to select the most disempow-
ered members of society for the most dangerous occupations. The evidence
points to the fact that poorer people of color and immigrant workers are once
again being tracked into the most hazardous types of jobs, and that these jobs
are becoming ever more hazardous once they become racially segmented (AFL-
CIO 2017). Occupational exposure to cancer-causing substances, pesticides and
toxic chemicals, and dangerous working conditions are especially prevalent for
 CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 21

people of color. In California, for instance, Hispanic men have a two-and-a-half

times greater risk of occupational disease and injury than white men (Robinson
1989).
Despite the implementation of affirmative action programs and other accom-
plishments by the civil rights movement over the past three decades, the racial
segmentation of labor persists. The continued implementation of informal “job
closure” practices by business (and some unions) restricts occupational mobility
for racial and ethnic minorities into safer and better-paying jobs (Wright 1992).
Business owners and managers regularly rank people of differing racial and ethnic
backgrounds for specific job categories. White workers are typically placed the
head of the line for the most desirable jobs, especially those offering better
working conditions, higher pay, and opportunities for advancement. People of
color and ethnic minorities are typically placed at the end of the line (Kerbo
2011).
The racial segmentation of labor by this method is functional for capital in that
the “racialization” of certain occupations depresses wages/benefits, divides labor
against itself and inhibits unionization, as well as provides a large pool of unem-
ployed/underemployed workers that industry can draw from in periods of rapid
economic expansion. Just as importantly, the racial segmentation of labor inhibits
the ability of workers of color to escape dangerous jobs for safer occupations, in
the same way as racial segregation of communities inhibits the ability of residents
of color to escape ecologically dangerous neighborhoods for safer areas. To
provide a labor force for the dirty industry, semi-skilled blue-collar workers
may be channeled to live in row homes near industrial zones; while unskilled,
underemployed members of the “underclass” are pushed into distressed inner-
city neighborhoods and serve as a reserve army of cheap labor for nearby dirty
industries. Not coincidentally, African Americans, Latinos, and the working
poor face much greater risks for living in much closer proximity (location risk)
to the most accident-prone facilities (operations risk) in the United States
(Elliott et al. 2004; Orum et al. 2014).
Knowing that occupational mobility is limited, capital can place greater
demands upon workers of color, and also slash costs relating to occupational
health and safety programs. Occupational dangers are even more profound for
those unskilled or semi-skilled immigrants and undocumented workers that
lack the formal legal protections afforded by U.S. citizenship (Anderson,
Hunting, and Welch 2000). Mexican-born workers are about 80 percent more
likely to die on the job than U.S.-born workers (compared to 30 percent in the
mid-1990s). Often in the country “illegally,” and reluctant to complain about
poor working conditions for fear of deportation or being fired, they are nearly
twice as likely as the rest of the migrant population to die at work. Mexicans
also make up the largest segment of migrant farmworkers. Tens of thousands
of farmworkers in the United States suffer from pesticide poisoning each year
(Berkey 2017). Struggling to protect farmworkers and their communities from
these poisons in the Trump era will be no small task, but it is now a key com-
ponent of the struggle for EJ in the United States.
22 D. FABER

Facilitating Global Capital’s Appropriation of Nature Belonging to

the Popular Classes
Under the new ecological imperialism brought about by neoliberal globalization,
the prosperity of transnational capital is becoming increasingly predicated on the
racialized appropriation of surplus environmental space from the global South
(Foster and Clark 2018). By expanding its ecological footprint and other forms
of unequal ecological exchange, global capital accumulation depends upon the
confiscation of biomass production from the global South (Hornborg 2011). In
other words, the expansion of wealth on behalf of the United States, China,
and the core European Union states under globalization fundamentally involves
the use of greater quantities of undervalued natural resources from other terri-
tories occupied by the global subaltern, as well as the increased displacement of
environmental harm (such as pollution) to those territories, and it is creating
an unparalleled ecological crisis of global dimensions (Jorgenson and Clark 2012).
In contrast, economic growth in the global South has been led by exports of
energy, raw materials, and consumer goods to the North. This turn toward
export-oriented industrialization is being driven by (FDIs) and foreign lending
provided by the United States and other advanced capitalist countries, and is
intended to facilitate the appropriation and development of domestic business
facilities, energy supplies, and natural resources by transnational investors.
Thus, global free trade is creating a new international division of labor in
which, on one hand, the South favors exports of cheap raw materials, energy,
technology components, and consumer goods to the United States, and on the
other, the United States favors capital goods and services for export within the
North and to the South. In short, while the global South produces wealth in
the commodity form, the United States produces wealth in the “capital form”
(O’Connor 2000, 162).
Under processes of unequal ecological exchange the massive quantities of
physical wealth now entering the United States (in the form of energy, raw
materials, foodstuffs, and durable consumer goods) are greatly undervalued in
the world economy. With international trade largely under the control of North-
ern-based transnational corporations, the concrete and potential natural wealth
found in United States imports of energy and raw materials are in much
greater proportion than the monetary (abstract) wealth that is exported back to
the global South. Through exploitative world trade relations, the United States
appropriates the bio-capacity of the global South. This process also includes
the damage done to the economies of the global South resulting from United
States exports of pollution, hazardous waste, greenhouse gases, and other ecologi-
cal hazards (Warlenius 2016). Moreover, the ecological debt arising from excessive
use of the South’s environmental space by transnational capital is accelerating in
the new millennium, even as the economic debt owed by many in the global South
countries to U.S. banks continues to grow (Martinez-Alier 2007). The South’s
economic debt and the North’s ecological debt are symptomatic of the “unfair”
trade-off brought about by neoliberal globalization, a facet that can only
worsen under Trump’s “America First” political philosophy.
 CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 23

Defined in terms of global North versus global South, corporate-led globaliza-

tion is seen as magnifying externally- and internally based environmental injus-
tices to the advantage of transnational capital. In much of the developing world
access to natural resources is being restricted by the transformation of commonly
held lands into capitalist private property, that is, by the “commodification of
nature” (Goldman 1998). Those peoples in the global South who draw their live-
lihood directly from the land, water, forests, coastal mangroves, and other ecosys-
tems are becoming displaced in order to supply cheap raw materials for local
dominant classes and foreign capital. Laboring in service of this new global
order, but receiving few of its benefits, the popular majorities of the developing
world—the poor peasants, workers, ethnic minorities and indigenous peoples
who make up the subsistence sector—struggle to survive by moving onto ecolo-
gically fragile lands or by migrating to the shantytowns of the cities by the million
to search for employment. Often left with little means to improve the quality of
their lives, the world’s poor (especially women) are being forced to over-exploit
their own limited natural resource base in order to survive (Shiva 2005). In
much of the Third World, these survival strategies by the popular classes in
response to their growing impoverishment result in the widespread degradation
and ecological collapse of the environment. As a result, globalization-inspired
development models are becoming increasingly unviable in the global South,
giving birth to popular-based movements for social and ecological justice, i.e.
to an environmentalism of the poor (Martinez-Alier 2002).

Conclusion
The threats posed to the profits of major corporate polluters by the environmental
and EJ movement are invoking a profound political backlash. Spearheaded by
agribusiness, oil and gas, mining, timber, petrochemical, and manufacturing
industries, these corporate polluters are channeling enormous sums of money
into anti-environmental organizations, public relations firms, foundations,
think tanks, research centers, and policy institutes, as well as the elections cam-
paigns of “pro-business” candidates in both major political parties. Motivated
by the real and potential costs of environmental protection, the goal of this “pol-
luter-industrial complex” is the establishment of reactionary neoliberal regulatory
reform towards the wholesale dismantling of the environmental protection state
(Faber 2008). Trump and his appointees are implementing draconian cuts to the
EPA’s budget, weakening or preventing the enforcement of existing regulations,
and delegating programs to financially strapped local and state governments
lacking the capacity to assume the task. As a result, the ability of the EJ,
climate change, and ecology movements to win even limited reforms has been
effectively blocked at the federal level.
The news is not all bad, however. More than ever, people are fighting for their
basic right to a clean and healthy environment at the local and state levels. In poor
African-American and Latino neighborhoods of small towns and inner cities,
depressed Native American reservations, and Asian-American communities all
across the country, people who have traditionally been relegated to the periphery
24 D. FABER

of the environmental movement under the progressive neoliberal regime are

increasingly challenging the ruination of their land, water, air, and community
health by corporate polluters and indifferent governmental agencies (Martinez-
Alier et al. 2016). Acting in coalition with the rise of new forms of community-
based, working-class environmentalism, anti-toxics activism, climate change
advocacy, just transition and the clean production movement, the EJ movement
is slowly but surely developing networks and long-term strategies for arresting the
ecological crisis (Holifield, Chakraborty, and Walker 2017). As such, the contin-
ued growth and prosperity of these EJ organizations and networks are essential to
constructing a more inclusive, democratic, and transformative environmental
politics capable of addressing the political-economic roots of environmental
and climate injustice. The task facing the Left and the readers of CNS is to help
advance this agenda and build a truly counter-hegemonic ecology movement.

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, Laura Pulido, and Christina Schlegel for their
comments and input. I remain responsible for all shortcomings.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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Daniel Faber
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Northeastern University,
Boston, MA, USA
d.faber@northeastern.edu