Theories of Political Ecology, Monopoly Capital Against People and The Planet

Article
Theories of Political Agrarian South: Journal of

Political Economy
Ecology: Monopoly 12(1) 12–50, 2023

© 2023 Centre for Agrarian Research
Capital Against and Education for South (CARES)

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DOI: 10.1177/22779760221145232
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Max Ajl1,2
Abstract
This article engages with and critiques dominant theories of political
ecology. It takes the theory of ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) as
the framework of critique. It assesses the claims of “fossil capitalism,”
eco-modernism, extractivism, and degrowth, as well as the theories of
“post-development.” It finds that with the exception of degrowth, none
of them take imperialism or the global history of accumulation suffi-
ciently seriously, and either displace transformative obligations wholly
onto the South or adopt a framework which centers merely the agency
of the Northern working class or a class-blind movement of move-
ments. Instead, it proposes modifications of EUE based on the polar-
ized nature of accumulation and waste production and distribution, and
neocolonialism. It uses that framework to identify the antisystemic role
of nature-reliant peripheral semi-proletarian classes, and from there
reopens the debate on appropriate-scale industrialization along with
ecological transformations of agriculture as paths to development in the
twenty-first century.
Keywords
Agriculture, climate, degrowth, extractivism, imperialism, ecologically
unequal exchange
1
University of Ghent, Ghent, Belgium
2
Observatory of Food Sovereignty and the Environment, Tunis, Tunisia
Corresponding author:
Max Ajl, University of Ghent, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 41, 9000 Gent, Belgium.
E-mail: max.ajl@ugent.be
Ajl 13
Introduction
Political ecology emerged as a field of study in the 1970s in reaction to
dominant political science, Marxism’s lack of focus on the impact of eco-
logical damage on working-class health and well-being, and widespread
environmental determinism.1 The discipline is generally understood as
concerned with understanding ecology from the perspective of political
economy, or the science of uncovering the laws linked to production and
consumption in human society. In the 1980s, new currents of Marxism
emerged, fusing value theory and focus on the environment, with recon-
struction of ecological thinking in the Marxist canon (Foster, 1999; Mies
& Shiva, 1993; O’Connor, 1988). This article reviews and critiques a
selection of strands of social-ecological theory prominent in the core.
It is not a reconstructive survey or genealogy. It focuses on extractivism
and the post-development school, degrowth, “fossil capitalist” Marxist
approaches, and ecologically unequal exchange (EUE).
These theories have distinct taproots, reflecting the periodization of
their emergence and the cycles of struggles and “ecological crisis,” or
the under-reproduction of the non-human ecology in a way which
damages working-class well-being or the conditions of capitalist accu-
mulation, against which they emerged (Leonardi & Torre, 2022).2 The
new debate uniquely emerges amidst shifts within the earth system
which threaten to make it unhospitable to human life.3 Accordingly, there
are political elements behind the emerging debate which must orient a
critique of it, attentive to how these theories may be recuperated by
monopoly capital, or seek rupture with it via national liberation and
revolution.
First, it is increasingly recognized within ruling-class institutions
(World Economic Forum, 2020) that the waste element of accumulation
threatens to undermine the natural conditions needed for the reproduc-
tion of capital. Second, such institutions worry over Northern ability to
control population flows, needed to preserve polarized accumulation,
which rests on modulated mobility of labor from the periphery to core.
Third, despite the partial rollback of the national liberation movement
(Abdel-Malek, 1985) many forces and processes continue to contest the
future of the world system and shift to multipolarity, including partially
industrialized semi-peripheries, such as Brazil and South Africa, theo-
retically subject to capture by radical forces; decreased ability of monop-
oly capital to dictate military outcomes, especially in the Arab region
where anticolonial or antisystemic militia have been engaged in direct
military confrontation with Western proxy forces; near-permanent
14 Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 12(1)
insurrection (Yeros, 2021); the presence of newly radicalized states, such

as Venezuela and Zimbabwe, which harbor or incarnate antisystemic
struggles; and the rise of China, whose nature cuts in and out of the con-
temporary ecological debate.
The theory of EUE frames the critique. EUE emerged in the mid-
1980s as a “biophysical” revision of Marxism, noting that throughout
history, certain regions of the world economy were exporting material
throughput while remaining underdeveloped. Such work has focused on
the physical exchanges embodied in international trade. It has established
the non-neutrality of technology not merely with respect to facilitating
international value flows, but from the uneven impacts of ecological crisis.
It has been an important empirical addition to work on unequal exchange
in international trade (Emmanuel, 1972), highlighting the North–South
contradiction at the heart of global accumulation and the ecological
crisis (The Cocoyoc Declaration, 1975). This article deploys and recon-
stitutes the findings of EUE to show how uneven accumulation impacts
core and periphery differently. It furthermore shows the limits of EUE as
a unified theory of imperialism. It reworks EUE to show how the under-
reproduction of peripheral or global natures has sharp impacts on
peripheral semi-proletariat and peasant sectors. It shows how this often
involves the expropriation of previous commons, including the atmos-
phere, by colonial or imperial states, or by neocolonial intermediaries.
Correspondingly, this article shows the centrality of peripheral marginal-
ized/semi-proletariat forces in resisting monopoly capital and achieving
social control over the human-ecology metabolism.
The article furthermore argues that many of the prominent new theo-
ries tend to follow two paths. One follows an old path of focusing on the
agency of a nationally-constituted Northern working class or foregoes
class analysis all together, justifying national-chauvinist Northern eco-
logical politics, blind to polarization and permanent primitive accumula-
tion. The other displaces the debate over political paths to the future from
North to South, but in fragmentary ways which reject national projects.
Accordingly, these theories, whether as outcomes of their methodologies
or as explicit political programs, construct political agents/subjects
walled off from the major contemporary struggles in the weak links of
global capitalism. Fossil capitalism is mistaken in its reliance on a false
theory of linear proletarianization and strategic calls for internationalism
without accounting for the different paths to popular ecological develop-
ment; and eco-modernism (alongside fossil capitalist thinking) has
argued for the categorical technological neutrality of technology. In this
way, they are blind to EUE and its relationship to technological
Ajl 15
development and polarized accumulation more broadly. While “extrac-

tivism” has a peripheral genealogy, it does not adequately contend with
EUE and lacks any serious theory of development, when it does not
reject the category entirely.
The essay proceeds in the following manner. The first section deals
with four prominent theories of political ecology: fossil capitalism and
eco-modernism, extractivism, and degrowth. It, then, examines EUE.
It proceeds to an immanent critique of EUE, showing how its empirical
findings can be placed on sounder footing in regard to value theory.
It links EUE to a broader criticism of capitalism as a regime for waste
production and shows the domestic class basis of EUE. The second half
of the essay re-asserts the centrality of national liberation to resolving
contemporary crises.
Imperialism or Fossil Capitalism?

The rise of global warming as a “universal” issue has resurrected classic
debates within Marxism. While Marx recognized the centrality of “prim-
itive” accumulation to historical capitalism and linked that accumulation
to his model of capitalism, he did not elaborate on a theory of colonial-
ism and imperialism. His European successors had trouble breaking with
the Eurocentrism of their radical tradition. Lenin and Luxemburg were
the first prominent Marxist European theorists to pay attention to impe-
rialism and the periphery of capitalist development. With the rise of the
Asian and African national liberation movements and radicalized Latin
American states, theories of neocolonialism and dependency emerged to
holistically interpret the dialectic of “interior” and “exterior” in periph-
eral underdevelopment. A certain Marxism resisted these interventions,
suppressing the role of primitive accumulation while building a historical
interpretation of capitalism with origins essentially in domestic British
class structures and polemicizing against autocentered development for
the periphery (Brenner, 1977). These efforts laid the groundwork for
theorizing the state absent imperialism, even while others from similar
positions re-incanted the daemon of a historically progressive role for
capitalism (Ahmad, 1983). This debate—which refused to engage seri-
ously most theorists of dependency and neocolonialism and reduced
development to industrialization—was not resolved but rather politically
evaporated as part of intellectual structural adjustment.4
Amidst the climate crisis—the broader ecological crisis is increas-
ingly sidestepped—much political ecology has partially restaged the
discussion, with accompanying Eurocentrism, methodological national-

ism, and overfocus on the industrial and Northern spheres of the labor
process. This has required retooling historical materialism and Marxism,
building a foundation for subsequent CO2-centric strategic elaborations.
These theories draw arbitrary spatial and social borders around their con-
ception of accumulation, in effect claiming that much of the periphery,
barely woven into the CO2 circuit, is not relevant to theorizing the politi-
cal ecology of emissions, and erasing the agrarian question from ecologi-
cal politics.
Such carbon reductionism is not new.5 However, Andreas Malm
(2013) has elaborated it amidst considerable theoretical magic works,
setting out a new “general formula” of “fossil capital”: “increasing quan-
tities of CO2…are a necessary part of capital accumulation…they are
materially indispensable for value creation… Fossil capital…is self-
expanding value passing through the metamorphosis of fossil fuels into
CO2” (Malm, 2013, pp. 51–52, italics in original). This theory runs into
a number of issues. First, it implies energies that increase labor produc-
tivity ought to be part of general theories of accumulation—animal
capital to water capital to fossil capital to solar capital. Yet, although
fossil fuels are physically integrated into productive circuits and end-use
commodities in profound ways, capitalism is likely capable of shifting
away from emitting CO2. The theory of fossil capital, which prioritizes
climate, sidesteps the distributional consequences of alternative energy
installations (Dunlap, 2019; Franquesa & Bartolome, 2018; Stock &
Birkenholtz, 2021), and mineral sourcing, whose costs and benefits will
fall upon imperialist and capitalist lines of power and powerlessness.
The framework justifies carbon exceptionalism using “emergency”
logic, reducing the ecological crisis and the broader crisis of social repro-
duction to global warming. Yet, the nature “of the terrain on which all
other [struggles] operate,” the so-called necessary conditions for social
reproduction on a world scale are implied or asserted rather than argued
(Malm, 2016, p. 287). Soil erosion and biodiversity loss have been equally
necessary for capital accumulation.6 Poor peasants can shift to more
drought resilient crops, but not if germplasm diversity has been destroyed
by the Green Revolution, or if trophic webs collapse, or if planetary
boundaries are otherwise exceeded (see Pörtner et al., 2021; Rockström
et al., 2009). Global warming is one amongst many peripheral crises.
Furthermore, “fossil capital” overstates its own centrality to and explana-
tory capacity of “fossil capital” to accumulation on a world scale, erasing
the contours of imperialist devastation and targeting, and contemporary
resistance. Drawing on Postone, Malm argues, “the temporality of
Ajl 17
capitalist property relations is homologous…time as incorporeal reposi-

tory of events which heeds no seasons…or other concrete appearances in
nature” (2013, p. 55). He and other carbon socialists point out that the
peak period of capitalist growth has been associated with the industrial
revolution and carbon-based energy sources to justify the effective
replacement of monopoly capital (and imperialism as a stage of capital-
ism) with “fossil capital” due to its role in the expansion of surplus value
and the creation of capital as unrooted in nature.
Although Malm tries to soften his assertion and claims he is merely
illustrating a tendency, this argument is mistaken. It sidesteps how post-
colonial versus imperial nation-states are politically positioned in the
process of accumulation on a world scale. For the myopic focus on
energy sources understates a central feature of the last two centuries:
European colonialism and the qualitative advance of European technolo-
gies of destruction. Settler devastation itself has been encompassing for
its victims. Associated fossil-fueled growth has been linked with eradi-
cation or partial dismantling of the productive forces of the periphery
(Patnaik & Patnaik, 2016, pp. 30–37). War is as central as oil and coal to
capital, if not more so. Furthermore, capitalist property relations do rest
on concrete appearances in nature, directly structuring global accumula-
tion, and such appearances show no secular tendency toward disappear-
ance. Many commodity crops can only be produced in the periphery,
which is why it harbors massive labor reservoirs and is darkened by
underdevelopment, to compress tropical commodity prices and preserve
the value of money; such concrete appearances were essential to the
primitive accumulation via drain that produced monopoly capitalism
(Patnaik & Patnaik, 2021). Likewise, oil production is largely concen-
trated in the periphery, a fact that Malm only recognizes through his
commentary on extraction. Yet, not all oil is extracted, and the politics of
who controls oil wealth has been central to which oil gets extracted. The
presence and nature of oil in the Arab region have led to de-development
and decreased envelopment of Arab region working-class populations
into the fossil-fuel energy system (Ajl, 2021c; Kadri, 2016, p. 249ff;).
Syria and Yemen have seen decreased per capita and even gross CO2
emissions as part-and-parcel of the US wars (Higgins, forthcoming) per-
secuted against those countries. Such wars are integral to accumulation
on a world scale. They are not separate from the law of value.
Asserting rather than establishing the homologousness of contempo-
rary capitalism is a pretext to overprivilege climate over broader ecologi-
cal crises, overlook super-exploitation and international value flows,
suppress the basic fact that many people in the world system are not and
will not have anything more than a marginal relationship to fossil capital
except as its energy-poor victims, and ignore the imperial warfare asso-
ciated with defending petrodollar imperialism and the profits associated
with core oil monopolies.
Strategy echoes analysis. Malm makes fossil fuel–induced global
warming “the movement of movements, at the top of the food chain”
(2016, p. 287). Such false universalism is a pretext to elevate the agen-
cies of Northern workers or other social layers, postponing other lib-
eratory struggles, and making the particular needs of the periphery
subject to a broader cause claimed to be universal but reflecting the
viewpoint of a Northern left. Focusing on emissions at the point of
consumption and Northern transport and asserting a climate “emer-
gency” does not consider how climate damages pass through the prism
of peripheral social arrangements, nor that such damages may only be
addressed by social blocs which need to produce CO2 to develop, nor
that they often prioritize anti-imperialism or agrarian reform rather
than emissions reductions. This parochialism leads to adventurist strat-
egy based on political and social actors who can intervene to sabotage
(“blow up”) those circuits at the point of distribution (Malm, 2021): the
core industrial and petty bourgeois (Sakshi, 2021; Wilt, 2021).7
Furthermore, reducing the socio-ecological problem of waste under
industrial capitalism to CO2, and a blindness to specific peripheral
social-ecological challenges, leads to neocolonial solutions like “rec-
ommending” global veganism or Half-Earth conservation (Ajl &
Wallace, 2021; Büscher et al., 2017). Finally, “fossil capital” fetishism
has defended nonexistent climate drawdown technologies (Malm &
Carton, 2021). This is an antifossil capitalism lacking social agents, disin-
terested in dialogue with the particular demands emanating from the
periphery, and intrigued with a voluntarist notion of “taking over” capital-
ist technology or planning solutions, ideologically disorganizing resist-
ance to them.
Eco-modernism
Another political ecology, in essence a subset of the fossil capital
literature, has a similar class analysis, if sometimes more attentive to class
composition in the core, in particular the role of environmental/climate
NGOs. Yet, these eco-modernist kinds of literature echo fossil capital
in their acceptance of a secular tendency toward proletarianization,
referring to the working class as an undifferentiated mass without
Ajl 19
distinct orientations to the productive apparatus, or primarily or solely

as the industrial laboring/unionized sectors, and ignore if not deprecate
discussion of non-directly waged labor within the process of social labor.
Some of this literature goes further yet in its inattention to class analysis,
severing the natural environment from social labor, claiming natural
systems do not require labor for their reproduction (Huber, 2018), and
this is why such “nature” is not valued. This notion rests on the a priori
apartheid concept of radical human–nature separations, eliding the
historical and contemporary role of labor in producing and maintaining
socio-natures (Erickson, 2008; Toledo, 2001). For while such labor is
necessary (historically) for the creation and reproduction of the natural
environment and human societies, it is seldom accounted for, and the
lack of accounting of this nature is connected to racial, patriarchal, and
colonial ideologies which have justified the appropriation of peripheral
land (Gill, 2021).
When it comes to technology, it embraces a wide range of now-
capitalist-promoted technologies, from biofuels to nuclear to lab-grown
meat (Ajl, 2021a, pp. 42–56).8 This technological politics confuses opposition
to the agenda of monopoly capital, which is implemented through certain
paths of technological development.
Such theory likewise echoes the fossil capital work in ignoring South–
North value flows and super-exploitation which constitute the particular
shape of Northern social compacts—the Brenner hypothesis teleported to
the ecological sphere—and thereby lays the groundwork for national
socialisms (Huber, 2022). It has been broadly silent on trade-union support
for imperialism. These points do not deny the core working class a role in
ecological transition but clarify that constituting an internationalist front
must account for the difference within the working class on national bases,
and the need to rupture with union support for imperialism.
Capitalist Industrialization Against Nature:

Extractivism
Another dominant set of themes within contemporary political ecology
concerns the human-environment metabolism. One cluster, extractivism,
is probably the most popular theory of political ecology. It originally
focused on popular territorial resistance against extraction, including
“internal” struggles within Western capitalist settler-states. By now,
this literature enfolds criticisms of industrial agriculture and labor
exploitation more broadly. Superficially, these theories take seriously

peripheral social struggles, claiming a continuity between Southern neo-
liberal and neo-developmental states concerning their inability to break
from ecologically harmful resource extraction, and blaming Southern
commodity exports for contributing to underdevelopment. However,
conceptually, extractivism is incoherent, lacks serious attention to
futures planning and displaces politics onto the South. Its diagnoses are
frequently paired with attacks against an undertheorized “development,”
a term that conflates any number of distinct models and class interests
that affected how productive forces and their products were deployed
and distributed. They furthermore mirror the fossil capital literature in
focusing only on a portion of the labor process, ignoring the contradic-
tions of Southern development and national liberation as they unfold
against imperialism and monopoly capital.
Consider some definitions. Gudynas defines extractivism as the
“appropriation of natural resources,” (2019), while Svampa writes that
“neo-extractivism refers to a way of appropriating nature and a develop-
ment model based on the over-exploitation of natural goods,” alongside
export orientation (2019, pp. 6–7). Klein writes that extractivism entails
“the reduction of human beings…into labor to be brutally extracted,
pushed beyond limits” (2014, p. 169). Two problems arise. First, their
particular notion of appropriation/exploitation, as applied to all use of
natural resources and capitalist use of labor, is incoherent. All historical
social production involves human use of non-human nature—“[a]ll pro-
duction is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and
through a specific form of society” (Marx, 1973, p. 87)—while exploita-
tion in the technical sense is specific to capitalism (García Linera, 2013).
Extractivism cannot be this kind of appropriation unless it is a historical
constant, which would mean it cannot meaningfully describe a distinct
accumulation regime; and “natural goods” can be consumed in a produc-
tion process and not restored—let alone their productivity enhanced, as
is possible in some forms of agriculture—but not exploited except meta-
phorically, or at least not like humans are exploited. Indeed, Klein’s
framework submerges proletarianization, labor exploitation, commodifi-
cation, and capitalism in a gelatinous “extraction,” offering little strate-
gic map and less conceptual clarity. Second, their notion of “processing”
is simplistic. Mining implies the application of constant and variable
capital to non-human nature; “petroleum necessitates installations just
as expensive as steel” (Emmanuel, 1972, p. xxx); the capital ratio in
extractive sectors and agriculture can be exceedingly high. The degree of
processing can, but need not, correlate with increased value captured
Ajl 21
domestically which can, but need not, mean a greater labor share of
value secured in the production process. Depending on technologies of
production, greater domestic processing can, but need not, mean greater
damage to non-human nature. These metrics fail to capture in a clear way
the choices involved in development planning and fail to illuminate
historical shifts in processing and value-added within the periphery.9
Furthermore, as with “fossil capital,” this framework is trapped in
methodological nationalism, although with the optic on allegedly native-
born pathologies of peripheral developmentalism. Although there are
gestures to the global evolution of the world-capitalist system and the
historical insertion of peripheral states into the global division of labor,
the world system and imperialism persistently evaporate from nationalist
sociologies. There is hardly a single clear reference in extractivist litera-
ture to the difficulties in moving toward nationalization or large-scale
agrarian reform in a moment wherein peripheral state structures, such as
Haiti, Iraq, Syria, or previously Afghanistan have been subject to preda-
tory attacks and partial re-colonization by core states. The imperialist
regulation of the international division of labor only enters obliquely,
through a discussion of “globalization” (Gudynas, 2018, p. 66) or “accu-
mulation by dispossession” (Lander, 2013, pp. 92–94), drawing on
David Harvey to erase “the structured nature of the centre–periphery
contradiction in historical capitalism” (Moyo et al., 2012, p. 88).
Throughout the extractivist literature and the nationalist institutional
sociology of the “compensatory state,” there is little attention to the
world-systemic, imperial, factors contributing to the inability and unwill-
ingness of “Pink Tide” states to confront imperialism and neocolonial
class structures (Koerner, 2022), including neocolonial blackmail target-
ing the regional titan Brazil (Antunes de Oliveira, 2022), or sanctions
levied on the only state to swim against the tide to implement a genuine
land-to-the-tiller agrarian reform, Zimbabwe. Nor does extractivism
mention the burden of arms spending, or the need of radical states to
constrain their militaries to avoid coups, the most frequent vector of
imperialist intrigue in the region. Additionally, ruling-class Thermidor—
landlord hiring of mercenaries to assassinate peasant activists to stymie
the Venezuelan agrarian reform, or Bolivian ruling-class attacks against
the MAS project (Vázquez & Arias, 2021)—does not enter extractivismo
sociology. The silence on sanctions vis-à-vis the development of value-
added processes in Venezuela and their implications in terms of capacity
to access finance is another blindness (Rodríguez, 2021). These accounts,
additionally, are silent on the US role in the coups that isolated radical-
ized Latin American states (Svampa, 2019, pp. 54–55; Webber, 2020).
Furthermore, this literature underplays the achievements of the radical

governments in locking in greater absolute and relative shares of value
domestically and moving toward greater in situ transformation as has
occurred in Bolivia. It is missed that such governments did not merely
attack a central basis of domestic accumulation but swam against the
neoliberal current which marshals credit down-rating, destabilization,
and sanctions against bids to shift the world balance of power. Indeed,
this literature uses the macroeconomic stabilization achievements of the
Bolivian government as a criticism of its development model (McNelly,
2020). It is accordingly missed that any shift toward socialized planning
in a peripheral state risks imperial-imposed currency debauchment and
sanctions, and large hard currency reserves and low inflation are a buffer
against those tools.
Another facet of this methodological nationalism is assessing the eco-
logical record of “extractivist” states only within the territorial box. Yet,
it is universally recognized that Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia have been
calling for ecological debt repayments, one way to avoid social versus
ecological trade-offs inevitable in mineral extraction. Ecuador has
enshrined the “right to nature” in its constitution, and even attempted to
negotiate with core states to avoid having to exploit its oil reserves in
Yasuni National Park—a proposal which those states did not support.
Furthermore, member states of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of
Our America (Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América,
ALBA) helped block the commodification of the atmosphere implied in
carbon markets (Watts & Depledge, 2018). Additionally, this literature
proceeds absent a serious historical sociology of the role of China, reduc-
ing it to another “extractive” partner within the international division of
labor (cf. Moyo, 2016), while kindred work, sometimes invoking a
dubious “globalization,” focuses on China’s role in a new dependency
cycle in Africa and Latin America. However, China cannot assume any-
thing like the historical US–European colonial or neocolonial relation-
ship to the remainder of the periphery, because China is too big to have
its own periphery—while it can import surplus value, it cannot do so at
a rate that would enable it to become a pole of polarized accumulation,
even were it to fully displace the contemporary core (Li, 2021).
Furthermore, China is not imperialist, since imperialism concerns a rela-
tionship of net value import and the violence which stabilizes and
deepens such value flows (Kadri, 2019). Finally, China does not use
primitive accumulation to restructure internal political orders in the
periphery. At the interstate level is often cooperative rather than exploita-
tive (Miriam & To, 2021), and it is leading the world in renewables con-
struction and installation, alongside rapid reductions in pollution.10
Ajl 23
Each interpretive decision places the burden of political transforma-

tion entirely on the South and sidesteps the historical and contemporary
significance of regionalism and Latin American unity in socialist con-
struction and development planning (Bruckmann & Dos Santos, 2015;
Marini, 1969). Extractivismo too often offers a political ecology without
a geopolitics of development: eco-socialism in one country.
Extractivismo does not simply diagnose underdevelopment but
implies or calls for alternative forms of, or alternatives to, development.
Take three examples. First, Gudynas (2019) calls for suppressing extrac-
tion entirely. Second, Acosta proposes “sustainable activities…in the
sphere of manufacturing, agriculture, tourism, and especially knowl-
edge. Nature must definitely not be damaged any further” (2013, p. 80).
But to insist on the categorical nondamage to nature displaces the contra-
dictions of popular development from the North, the historical major
polluter, to the South. Others accept that the “post-extraction option …
[would imply] exploiting natural assets” alongside regional integration
(Svampa, 2012, p. 51); on paper, the agenda of the Latin American
radical states. To advance the debate, a sociology of the forces which
blocked that agenda is needed; but a world-systemic sociology, enfold-
ing domestic class obstacles—for these states did not dispossess their
bourgeoisies – is precisely where extractivism is weakest.11
In terms of planning, extractivism literature retreats from 1980s-era
work on industrialization toward basic needs and eco-development
within a self-reliant framework (Oteiza et al., 1983). Much appears to
reject Third World sovereign industrialization, especially metallurgy,
machine tools, and associated research and development. Calls for “sus-
tainability” and sustainable manufacturing imply this (but seldom clearly
state it), keeping in mind that industrialization is intrinsically nonsus-
tainable and polluting, because it works on abiotic materials and needs
an external agent to control its wastes, whereas soil damage directly
harms agriculture (Duncan & Duncan,1996). Extractivism does not seri-
ously approach the relative rural–urban balances needed for a popular
anticolonial and anti-imperialist development path nor have an answer
for what is to be done for Third World poor whose basic well being is
directly tied to export commodities. In terms of planning, extractivism
retreats from dependency and neocolonialism literature which advocated
commodity cartels and price planning, understanding one could not
simply rupture with capitalism and associated trade flows.
A cousin of these critiques are dismissals of socialist construction,
operating under “the pattern of Western civilisation and of unlimited
confidence in progress” (Lander, 2013, p. 88). However, the extractivist/
antidevelopmental literature has devoted little attention to how
monopoly capital has deformed socialist construction, and less to actu-

ally reconstituting an emancipatory ideological framework, defending
the needs of workers and peasants, and identifying and resisting the
agenda of monopoly capital (Jha et al., 2020). For example, Escobar sug-
gests that North–South “divisions…another modern binary…will tend to
dissolve as pluriversal perspectives asserts [sic] themselves” (2015),
with modernity displacing neocolonialism and imperialism. Such dis-
missals risk denigrating the role of socialist construction in development
and national liberation through deployment of a “decolonial” neither
left-nor-right logic. They ignore the lineage of thought drawing on mod-
ernist thinking, and engaging with alternative development, alternative/
appropriate technology, eco-development, agroecology, or people’s
science movements, which were part of rather than outside the history of
socialist construction (Mauro, 2021; Schmalzer, 2016). It remains
unclear how much antisystemic struggle and socialist-linked thought is
dismissed as “modernity’s” or “developmentalist baggage,” terms that
this literature seldom defines. Indeed, some of this literature totally
erases peripheral Marxism, which grounded those struggles (Rodney,
2018, ch. 1).12 It is noteworthy that anti-“modern” stances based on tradi-
tion have been taken up by reactionary forces in India, for example
(Krejčík, 2019); and absent a revolutionary force capable of taking over
the state, delinking, nationalizing all domestic enterprises, and breaking
from the law of value, what state could possibly rupture with what the
literature diagnoses as “developmentalism?” Indeed, taking state power
is not even on the agenda (cf. Heron & Dean, 2022), as disdain for the
state suffuses this literature, against the Chavista position that “it is not
an option to be governed by the criminals who ruled in the past”
(Marquina & Gilbert, 2020) or the Arab nationalist position defending
the “peripheral nation”s working [class’s]… right to exercise sover-
eignty, through the state, over its human and natural resources” (Kadri,
2016, p. 272). This hostility to the state has bled into extractivist theo-
rists’ concealment of US intervention in Latin America.13
Degrowth
Among prominent new-wave Northern climate theories, degrowth has
gone beyond epistemological “decolonization” to four matters: the
burden of Northern sociopolitical transformation, directly engaging
with the labor aristocracy and imperial modes of life; technologies
Ajl 25
for transformation (Vastinjan, 2018, 2021); EUE and climate debt;

capitalism and sometimes neocolonialism and imperialism. Degrowth
has above all thrown a wrench in growthist ideology’s legitimation of
Northern capitalism.
Critical debate has heretofore primarily focused on whether degrowth
advocates austerity for the core working class or mischaracterizes capi-
talism. The former is a serious question of how and when to enfold an
increasingly immiserated core working class into an international front
amidst South–North value flows, yet it is increasingly taken up from the
perspective of nationalist Northern eco-politics.14 The second objection
is relevant but often misphrased. Prominent theories of degrowth are
increasingly anticapitalist but tend to avoid theorizing value, deploying
a “simplified conceptual apparatus” (Heron, 2022), often focusing on
notions of “bullshit jobs” or the subjective uselessness or irrationality of
capitalist growth, and sometimes inattentive to capitalism’s unevenness.
The simplified conceptual apparatus is a shared ground between most
(but not all) degrowth analyses, laying the groundwork for lack of clarity
when it comes to the history of global accumulation.15 Accordingly,
some of this work has been opaque on historical capitalism’s dependence
on peripheral de-development. Such de-development is not what
degrowth theorists mean, but more focus on the historical evaporation of
the productive forces by Northern monopoly and colonial capitalism
would add heft to degrowth. Furthermore, degrowth is seldom suffi-
ciently clear that growth is a technical term referring to the sum total of
transactions in an economy, and such transactions can have vastly differ-
ent developmental implications depending on the local and global
balance of class power. Furthermore, growth not only refers to very dif-
ferent relationships over different periods, but is not necessarily a prior-
ity of capitalism—above all a relationship of hierarchy. Finally, although
degrowth is basically clear that it is for the core, the partial silence when
it comes to peripheral paths to popular development leaves alliances and
politics vague.
Because of these theoretical and political silences or opacities,
degrowth runs several risks. One, that it remains distant from the vehi-
cles needed for national liberation and delinking (Amin, 1987). Will
degrowth enter dialogue with Arab resistance forces, and national-
popular development in Zimbabwe, and along with many Venezuelan
and Bolivian grassroots movements, choose to struggle through and for
rather than against the state? The dominant current in degrowth focuses
on antiextractivist or non-state forces in Latin America to the exclusion
of the state. Such a position has risked sliding into an alliance with the
US–EU agenda of leaning on Latin American grassroots struggles to see

radical states as the primary contradiction rather than insisting that any
resolution of such contradictions, under any circumstances, cannot be
allied with US imperialism. A second risk: degrowth faces attempts
at recuperation from pro-capitalist forces within the imperial core,
precisely by seizing on its theoretical blurriness.16 A third risk is blurri-
ness in theorizing transition. While “small is beautiful” self-reliance
has been central to national liberation, degrowth does not deal with the
large portions of the global working class woven into monopoly capital
supply chains, particularly in the industrial sector. What strategy can
exist outside their nationalization and in the periphery, the mobilization
of domestic surplus through agrarian reform to build up productive
forces? Such an agenda would take shape against monopoly capital,
yet degrowth can melt opposition to capitalism into a call for “social
justice” (Fitzpatrick et al., 2022) instead of decommodification and
social control. For that reason, it remains acutely vulnerable to
instrumentalization.
EUE
A fourth strain of political ecology, EUE sketches the polarized nature
of the world system. This literature developed from studies in Brazil
(Bunker, 1988) and fused with older work, tracing back to CEPAL
structuralism, on uneven exchange and declining terms of trade for
Southern exports. That older work focused on commodity export
reliance. Subsequent elaborations quantified and historicized unequal
exchange in South–North trade, exceeding relative productivity
differentials—which, however, reflect earlier primitive accumulation/
unequal exchange (Amin, 1977b; Kadri, 2016, p. 249ff).
Some of that earlier work (Amin, 1977a, p. 138ff) referred to how the
“waste” of the nonhuman environment occurred unevenly and in a polar-
ized manner, causing more acute ecological crisis in the periphery than
in the core. They also pointed out that a “fair” price should include a rent
sufficient to allow for maintenance of renewable inputs or a replacement
activity for nonrenewable ones, and that pre-capitalist “forms of appro-
priation” allow for the non-payment of that rent (Amin, 1977b, p. 154).
Yet he did not elaborate this insight empirically or theoretically. More
recent work has focused on how relocation of industrial production from
core to periphery displaces pollution or aggravates it; on inequalities in
Ajl 27
use of atmospheric space and planetary capacity to absorb and metabo-

lize CO2; on inequalities in material flows measured in tonnage; and on
unequal deaths and vulnerability to climate-triggered disasters.
Clearly, these findings almost always relate to periphery-core value
flows. Yet there are methodological and theoretical problems with infer-
ring exploitation or value transfer from these tabulations; much of this
literature does not theoretically elaborate the facts it observes or elabo-
rates it in ways divorced from value theory, and such facts reflect differ-
ent types of enclosures or encroachments. First, we should be clear that
EUE is not a universal theory of the ecological consequences of imperi-
alism. Imperialism concerns net surplus-value transfer between national
capitals, and the project of primitive accumulation, domination, and
destruction inherent to stabilizing global value flows. That can involve
the military attack or settler-colonial destruction within countries or ter-
ritories whose productive forces are not central to accumulation through
competition, as with Haiti and Palestine, or which were subject to settler-
capitalist invasion. Second, on the theory’s own terms, national accounts
do not reflect all the raw material displacement involved in the trade, for
example, of refined minerals (Frame, 2014). And third, sometimes EUE
mirrors errors in extractivism, not engaging with value flows and the
global structure of monopoly capital. Unequal tonnage cannot itself
establish exploitation, since it would imply US national capital is
exploited when the US exports wheat, corn, and soybeans and their
derivatives—in fact, wheat export, using massive hectares, is a compo-
nent of imperialism through establishing import dependence and politi-
cal control over Third World development (Friedmann & McMichael,
1989). It also sidesteps distinct productive conditions for commodities.
EUE often and mistakenly conflates those flows to the ecological damage
which such flows can, but need not, rest on—wheat exports, for example,
happen to, but need not, rest on soil degradation, or the undermining of
the natural conditions for production.
We might do better to disaggregate the phenomena to which EUE
exchange occurs, and rework them using appropriate tools, in particular
through an appreciation of the role of the non-human environment in
constituting value—something much-debated within contemporary
Marxism (Moore, 2015). For example, when considering declining terms
of trade for Southern exports on world markets, which logically and his-
torically correspond to increased Northern usage through embodied
flows of Southern use-values or wealth including land, water, or primary
production, it is not clear that “appropriation” of peripheral natures by
the core is what is happening.
Such unevenness is real, yet needs to be theorized using dependency/

neocolonial theories. We can thus reframe this aspect of EUE as referring
to the unequal use and access to non-human nature through monopoly/
imperialist control of world trade relations, as they interlock with local
class structures, which are implicated in national-level primitive accu-
mulation—neocolonialism. One aspect occurs as peripheral exports
exchange for capital and suffers from uneven terms of trade as one
national capital enters uneven competition with another national capital
(Dussel, 1988). Power relations allow monopoly price-setting for com-
modities below their value for peripheral exports, and above their value
for core commodities. Furthermore, different national capitals struggle
over shares of rent. Finally, imperialist war continuously resets overall
terms of trade, and core states war in part to ensure low wages in the
periphery, while super-exploitation partially compensates for worsening
terms of trade, as argued by Marini (1973). Higher core wages are,
finally, bound to higher prices for core exports.
This trade, however, is distinct from appropriation or expropriation,
which implies primitive accumulation and the use of violence. Such vio-
lence is constant to imperialism and contributes to the relative power of
different nation-states in the exchange relationship yet is conceptually
distinct from that dynamic. Furthermore, the actual appropriation of or
encroachment on nature operates within the neocolonial capitalist nation-
space. It can be stopped there if necessary, or from there that higher
prices can be demanded for commodities, or value-added processing can
occur, or where commodities can be consumed without entering unequal
competition on the world market. On the other side of the historical coin,
when national states have emplaced domestic policies that push against
the law of value via decommodification, they have faced imperial vio-
lence via sanctions, proxy war, and direct war to bring them back into the
sphere of “normal” capitalist trade relations. Such imperialist actions
help constitute EUE but are not identical to it.
There are then the EUE theories dealing more directly with ecological
damages, which are related but not reducible to polarized use of global
resources. However, often EUE literature has proceeded without suffi-
cient attention to theorization of capital as a social metabolism: the
capital relation’s historical production of ecological crisis. Mapping eco-
logical crises and disparities in pollution, health outcomes, or vulnerabil-
ities to natural disaster is not the same as theorizing them. The systemic
destruction of human and non-human nature as inputs into the labor
process suggests the need to elaborate a robust notion of waste, bringing
Ajl 29
ecological destruction into value theory systematically. Marx brought

out this process in embryonic form, referring to how “[c]apitalist produc-
tion, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of
various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original
sources of all wealth—the soil and the labourer” (Marx, 1976, ch. 15).
The concept of waste is an elaboration of that process. Note, this is dis-
tinct from primitive accumulation, which refers to the separation of
workers from their means of production through involuntary and exter-
nal means (Patnaik, 2017). If primitive accumulation in the core led to
widespread social differentiation and proletarianization, this occurred on
the back of widespread wastage and destruction of the Third and Fourth
Worlds. Waste is the destruction of humanity and humanity’s inorganic
body and has been present as in input into the accumulation process
since 1492. As Kadri writes,
[a]s in imperialist war, the degradation of nature by capital, the incarnation

of the impersonal and objective forces of history, is means to control or regu-
late the reproduction of labour. Labour is the source of surplus value, the
unmediated profits. The erosion of the social and natural support platforms
of labour, the measures that reduce populations or shorten life’s expectancy
relative to the historically determined level, shrink the share of value from
the social product obtained by labour or undermine the spirit of labour; the
spirit of labour here refers to fighting subject in the working of class, which
would otherwise enhance the share of labour from the social product. (Kadri,
2019, p. xi)
Capital both relies on and undermines those forms of social nature

which are taken as a “given” for the reproduction of labor at any given
moment—an analogue of the workers’ consumption fund. As capital
encounters varied “natures”—those modified and maintained by
human labor and those which are “free” gifts—a number of forms of
degradation are possible. It may transform them with pollution, which
alchemizes that portion of nature into “a fund for the accumulation of
capital” (Marx, 1973, ch. 24), and such waste is observed empirically and
registered socially through the loss of human life before its historically
given possible level, or deteriorated life-quality, thereby lowering the
overall burden on capital of the reproduction of labor.
EUE has likewise pointed to capital mobility and the drive to labor
arbitrage by industrialization, whether under neocolonialism or under
sovereign projects like China’s. This tendency moves toward relative
under-reproduction and overpollution of peripheral societies and their
industrial sites (Althouse et al., 2021; Duan et al., 2021). Within this set
of dynamics, the sorts of degradation inherent in the many technical–
social–ecological processes to which EUE refers are similar: pollution
from industrial production, using highly polluting extractive technolo-
gies, or avoiding clean-up costs. EUE is almost inherent in contemporary
labor arbitrage, as ecological damage differentially impacts core and
peripheral working classes. The latter pays a higher social “price” for
surplus-value creation, as it comes not merely from their labor but less
capital expended on ecological protection. Therefore, we can bring the
wage relationship into EUE by pointing out that lower wages in the
periphery have large-scale ecological consequences. They are a cause of
the spatial displacement of highly polluting factories. Yet, lower wages
of peripheral labor will tend to correlate with a more permissive environ-
ment for ecological harm, generally reflecting the overall weakness of
peripheral national capitals and their states, a “hard” barrier produced by
postcolonial state formation and imperialism. This allows for the sup-
pression of constant capital costs related to health and safety linked to
the natural environment, which were costs imposed on Northern capital
through ecological movements forcing a new historical norm. Northern
air and water are protected whereas Southern airs and natures are not.
Socially necessary labor time for the production of commodities may
decrease when production moves to places where the cost of protecting
human health and ecological clean-up and remediation does not add to
the constant capital cost. Thus Somerville’s (2022, p. 68) objection that
higher wages (and one can infer, better protection from ecological harms)
occurs “primarily because the cost of labour power reproduction is
higher in the North than in the South” is not so much wrong as it entirely
misses the point. Such costs differ on North–South lines in part because
of Northern interference in the South to throttle wages through endless
methods. Furthermore, Somerville refers to wages as the cost of the
“daily and generational reproduction” of labor, yet, this is not a given but
reflects the achievements of the class struggle as crystallized in national-
level wages, subject to imperialist and neocolonial suppression.
Similarly, constant capital costs are reduced through lack of Southern
labor-environmental protections. And imperialism engineers such lack
of protections politically by undermining political sovereignty and sup-
porting the installation of socially regressive and ecologically destruc-
tive peripheral governments, as with Bolsonaro. These are the phenomena
toward which EUE points, and they cannot be denied.
EUE has furthermore pointed to the greater impact of climate change, or
the colonization and primitive accumulation of the atmosphere, on the
Ajl 31
South versus the North, including the direct destruction of lives through
natural disasters or long-run damage to the productivity of the South. Yet
EUE literature discussing this (Roberts & Parks, 2006) has not really
theorized such inequality. The low developmental level of the periphery
is cause and effect of imperialism, which aggresses or weakens Southern
state structures, particularly the weak ones—it cannot, for example,
effectively target China—producing a weak social and physical infra-
structure incapable of resisting or mitigating these impacts. Such impacts,
in turn, impact working/peasant classes in peripheral states far more than
the ruling classes, a fact which EUE’s emphasis on national aggregates
has not sufficiently illuminated. Contrariwise, Cuba’s capacity to avoid
death from climate change indicates the importance of revolutionary
mobilization and redistribution in avoiding ecological damage (Sims &
Vogelmann, 2002).
Finally, EUE can occur through forms of encroachment which destroy
the natural environment or commons—fields into factories (Sovacool,
2021). And as Ossome and Naidu (2021, p. 81) write, “given that the
need for reproduction of human life exists whether or not people are
employed by capital, the exponential growth of the surplus population
under neoliberalism has deepened the general level of reliance on unre-
munerated gendered labour necessary to ensure survival of this popula-
tion.” Such a lens clarifies the central role of this semi- or fully
proletarianized, and often female, class in social reproduction, including
the social reproduction of nature, on a world scale. For such labor is
unremunerated and gendered and also relies on nature in a less mediated
way in the periphery than in the core: wood for heating, small-scale agri-
culture for provisioning. Pollution or encroachment-and-destruction,
therefore, may undermine even more the conditions of reproduction of
the peripheral working class in the broadest sense, whether through the
simple eradication of the environment upon which they rely —producing
flight to slums or cities—or poisoning it, cutting further into their well-
being and shortening their lives below their historically given level. We
may consider this a further elaboration on some of Moore’s (2015) com-
ments regarding the lack of payment for peripheral nature.
These modifications of EUE theory show the relationship between
uneven flows, polarized patterns of pollution, neocolonialism and local
class structures, and dynamics of expropriation, encroachment, and
lack of remediation of local pollution within the periphery. They give
us insight into the class dimensions of EUE. These reformulations
accordingly provide us with better-ground theoretical lenses to offer
insight into dynamics of internal colonialism, gendered social
reproduction, and the need for “liberation from dependency…national

domination…and liberation of the oppressed people in the nation”
(Dussel & Yanez, 1990, p. 95, italics in original). They furthermore
allow us to reconsider social struggles mapped by the extractivism litera-
ture, without abandoning sovereign industrialization, which is frequently
suggested, but less often stated outright, in a wide range of political
ecology concerned with a diffuse “extraction.” EUE furthermore helps
us see how such price suppression and damage to nature relate to social
struggles resisting local damage to the ecology—the environmentalism
of the poor.17
Conceiving of capitalism as entropic, with value constituted by the
waste of earth’s capacity to support life and human life, clarifies theoreti-
cal and programmatic steps to replace capitalist metabolism and value
relations with substantively rational social planning. It is for these
reasons that attention to the wide span of labor processes and the produc-
tive and natural forces to which they are joined, the social subjects who
undertake them, and the specific frame within which to nest those dispa-
rate-yet-unified processes, subjects, and locations, is a necessary step to
create a theory of ecological revolution capable of unifying social forces
from their different locations. For example, Prasad’s (2019, 2020) point
about the labor needed for the social reproduction of the environment—
labor which is part of the value relation—provides a methodological
entry point to through which one could conceptualize the role of indige-
nous working classes which disproportionately engage in such nature-
preservation work, and could be a basis for suturing the social struggles
around extractive processes with broader antisystemic theory and prac-
tice. This perspective, not necessarily shared by those actors themselves,
allows us to see the labor of biodiversity preservation and social repro-
duction as two sides of one coin, a coin which nevertheless in many ways
accrues to monopoly capital, South and North, in ways similar to the role
of unwaged labor of social reproduction, which has historically fallen
upon women (Federici, 2012; James, 2012).18 The challenge is in seeing
it accrue to labor.
The National and Agrarian Questions: What Kind of

Decolonization?
Before proceeding, it is necessary to clarify the role of national liberation
in socialist construction. In Cabral’s formulation, national liberation
concerned sovereign development of the productive forces, wrested from
Ajl 33
monopoly capital. It was revolutionary and could only be achieved by

mobilizing and reflecting the needs of the popular classes. Autocentered
development, abstracted from Chinese development pre-1978, advanced
on Cabral to crystallize the lessons of socialist construction. Two points
must be emphasized: one, the path to the general passed through the
particular and ran against certain European Communisms which wanted
to “subordinat[e]” the peasantry and national liberation “to a ‘higher’”
agenda (Jha et al., 2020, p. 10). Two, autocentered development did
treat ecological issues, even as it gestated in international fora which
sought to make national development subordinate to ecology framed as
a “universal” cause.19
If many strands of radical political ecology erase the agrarian-national
question through claiming all working people share the same relation-
ship with accumulation, including fossil capital, and suppression of the
political consequences of core-periphery value flows, turning them into
economistic phenomena, a different map of accumulation offers different
agents for changing the world. The natural and political “boundedness” of
capitalism creates the social conditions for national blocs of semi-proletar-
ians, rural proletariats/smallholders, and urban workers. Such blocs may
be able to walk along untested peasant paths to development which do not
require identical “heaviness,” in terms of how much damage they inflict on
the environment, as Northern paths to industrialization. Indeed, although
such groups are not responsible for the ecological crisis, there may be
opportunities for a more balanced path to eco-development, an alternative
style of development based on ecologically embedded production of basic
needs (Abdalla, 1976, 1977). Plainly, this rests on massive land-to-the-
tiller agrarian reforms and democratic systems of land management—
which furthermore offers scope for widespread CO2-negative farming
methods, with a range of ecosystem benefits. As Prasad (2019) points out,
the non-human environment under such logic can be seen as “socially
useful nature,” and production and labor for use value can only dominate
under socialized planning. Such planning would rest on properly valuing
the labor inputs of those engaged in the labor-intensive reproduction of
biodiversity, forests, and other labor processes which face marginalization
or primitive accumulation under capitalism.
Second, fossil-producing states face a burden of transition which has
to reflect internal social balances and planning horizons. They hold a
huge amount of leverage in terms of systemic ecological transition, yet
the deployment of their wealth is central to their own just transitions in a
way not reducible to immediate shattering of circuits of fossil-linked
capital (Perry, 2020). Additionally, oil’s location has been and remains the
basis for radicalized oil exporters to play a powerful role in transforming

the world system; struggles within the oil/gas sector and for national-pop-
ular sovereignty over oil are central to contemporary geopolitics. Workerist
Northern theories focus myopically on industrial production—oddly,
except when it comes to oil. They sideline any transformative role for
antisystemic processes (or states) with/in Venezuela, Bolivia, or Zimbabwe,
or the inheritors of revolutionary processes, such as Iran. Northern eco-
logical theory in general and Fossil Capitalism Thought in particular have
not only not engaged with these problematics but also have supplied argu-
ments that are imperial armaments: the primary force currently stopping
the flow of oil is the US state (cf. Upadhya, 2020).
Agroecology
The role of agriculture in popular development has arguably been the
central contribution of contemporary developmental theory to the eco-
politics of planning. This section considers some of that literature and
its relationship to national liberation and national-popular planning
and the role of self-reliance or delinking within that framework. It
focuses on agroecology as a historically-grounded set of theories and
practices around rural agronomy and development. The term loosely
refers to an ethnographic/ethnobotanical approach to traditional farming
systems, lifting up their practical ecological-economic logic, with some
similarities to Chayanovian farm-systems analysis (Rosset & Altieri,
2017). It is frequently paired with calls for agrarian reform, and a
capacious—if vague—approach to national food sovereignty based on
small-peasant agriculture. This approach has helped put the peasant
question back on the agenda in periphery and core, militating against
antipeasant and antiecological attitudes entrenched across the Northern
political spectrum, including the Northern left, often blind to the role of
smallholders, pastoralists, and the semi-proletariat in social reproduction
and socialist transition (Ajl, 2020).
Furthermore, agroecology has woven together issues relating to soil
health, biodiversity and protection of genetic diversity, and climate resil-
ience. The microeconomics of agroecology are increasingly developed,
often showing its effectiveness on a per-farm level even using
conventional and positivist accounting. While programmatically antimo-
nopoly, and often attached to rural movements which contest export-
oriented development models, agroecology’s macroplanning remains
underdeveloped. How should agroecology fit into larger national- or
Ajl 35
regional-level planning toward national or collective self-reliant devel-

opment models? Given short-run yield increases achievable on certain
types of land using conventional agriculture, does it have a role in break-
ing through capital-supply bottlenecks toward sovereign development?
Relatedly, while the potential role of agroecology (or other forms of
ecologically-friendly agriculture) in more balanced rural–urban develop-
ment is obvious, this matter has not entered agroecological literature in a
sustained way. This is the case even though agroecology has forwarded
political ecologies of land management patterns with potentially wide-
spread relevance across the periphery and the core, balancing biodiver-
sity preservation and social outcomes amongst farmers through a
“nature’s matrix” (Perfecto et al., 2009). Furthermore, agroecology has
raised the consequences for human health of industrializing agriculture,
an important point to be developed that would suture the “work” of
maintaining nature and the work of producing food, alongside the rela-
tive costs of lapsing into short-term and productivist versus social
control–oriented visions of food production (Sharma, 2017; Shattuck,
2020).
Additionally, agroecology has advanced dynamic and national-
liberation-oriented approaches to farm-level biological technology, in
particular concerning seeds (Wit, 2017). Focusing on national-level food
production, especially using endogenous/renewable technology, has a
latent or explicit national liberation edge; yet the relationship of this
edge to macroeconomics (Wong et al., 2020) and national self-defense
(Ayeb, 2019) has not been emphasized. Additionally, agroecology has
not embraced the challenge of contributing to the discussion on techno-
logical sovereignty as linked to the role of industry in producing appro-
priate models of industrialization, and even digitalization toward the
technical upgrading of agriculture. The contributions of China on all of
these fronts are ripe for further examination. Indeed, agroecology has not
systematically engaged with a wide range of peripheral agronomists,
engineers, and ecologists who considered sustainable agriculture and
future planning, but within a more explicit national-planning or national
liberation framework (see Ajl, 2019a; Ajl & Sharma, 2022; Cabral, 1954;
Paranjape et al., 2009).
At a broader level, the systemic orientation of agroecology remains
uncertain. Monopoly capital has attempted to recuperate agroecology,
including through Northern red-green-washing “regenerative” rhetoric,
which extends to ranching. Ambiguity in agroecology succors such
attempts, with some seeming to imagine “transformation” of the food
system can occur without attacking monopoly capitalism, reproducing
an analytical populism, forfeiting the role of theory in clarifying prac-

tice, and disdaining to engage with work examining agroecology’s
relationship to self-reliant national planning (Bezner Kerr et al., 2022).
This lack of clarity reproduces broader faults in mainstream “transfor-
mations” literature, which lacks a class perspective on the system to be
transformed and accordingly (and by design) is not useful for antisys-
temic movements (Blythe et al., 2018). Furthermore, while Latin
American movements for food sovereignty/agroecology are embedded
in sovereigntist politics, there is a risk a “global” agroecological move-
ment, often ambivalent about opposing capitalism (McGreevy et al.,
2022) can subsume the national question and imperialism.
What Kinds of Industrialization?

Lurking behind arguments concerning degrowth, extractivism, EUE,
and misplaced overemphasis on the transformative role of the Northern
working class is the question and pace of sovereign, ecologically
modulated industrialization. While degrowth has offered serious technical
proposals for shifts toward more ecologically embedded technology
(Decker, 2019) in the core, it is often connected with “extractivism”
theories that do not engage sovereign industrialization. EUE tends toward
agnosticism on this topic, while clarifying that existing worldwide
uneven industrialization is neither just nor sustainable, nor can it lead to
worldwide developmental convergence. Meanwhile, Northern working-
class-centered arguments assert that the socialization and development
of the productive forces in the core have created the material and social
basis for a Northern-centered transformation of those forces toward
ecological sustainability, overlooking that the Northern developmental
path and its ecological load cannot be replicated.
A first point of departure when considering industrialization and the
ecology is that just as imperialism, militarized industrialization, and
EUE have been linked for the core states, industrialization and self-
determination are linked in the periphery, particularly with respect to the
question of worker’s control. The pace and style of peripheral or semi-
peripheral industrialization and its relationship with self-defense trace
back to their interlinking with socialist construction. Contemporary dis-
missals of industrialization seldom recognize that Soviet heavy
industrialization was a defensive response to capitalist encroachment
(Kontorovich, 2015), and the pace and balances entailed in Chinese
industrialization, as well as human costs, occurred amidst similar
Ajl 37
pressures. Fewer Soviet emissions would have registered in a smaller

climate impact but could have created an industrial plant unable to defeat
the Nazi armies—“the single greatest contribution to the sustainability
and well-being of planetary life in the 20th century” (Moore, in Gann &
Sparrow, 2021, p. 41). Any experiment in national liberation will face
the problem of industrialization, and how to provide goods for their pop-
ulations and confront the distortions created by the need for defensive
industrialization (this is distinct from patterns of industrialization which
are purely or primarily neocolonial). Peripheral defensive industrializa-
tion under post-revolutionary, populist, or socialist governments may
have produced or will produce more CO2 now to produce less later on
and seems necessary in order to move toward a socially rational regula-
tion of the human/non-human-nature metabolism.20 Furthermore, in
imperially-aggressed states, removing imperial and colonial invaders is
a prerequisite to dealing effectively with the climate.
Therefore, the debate around industrialization remains open. Self-
reliant development and ecological transition should go hand in hand.
Sovereign and ecologically modulated industrialization is a part of that.
Such industrialization would still serve the technical upgrading of agri-
culture but would support a kind of agriculture which preserves soil
health. It is also urgent to revisit the debate around appropriate rural
industrialization, rethinking what kinds of technologies national states
may need to help develop in rural zones so as to decrease drudgery,
increase employment, and lock in use-value and exchange-value locally
during a period of long transition away from rule by monopoly
capitalism.
What kind of resources exist for examining these issues? From the
1970s onward, there has been a vibrant peripheral ecological debate that
critiqued the class orientation of industrialization without foregoing it.
Latin American theories of eco-development, critiquing “styles of
development,” a turn within CEPAL structuralism, was one endogenous
line of thought (ILPES, 1971; Sunkel, 1981; Sunkel et al., 1980). Such
thinking, perhaps especially in the Arab region, situated ecological crisis,
especially in the countryside, as a problem to be addressed through
nationally self-reliant economic planning and implicitly national libera-
tion (Ajl, 2019b, 2021b). Such thinking also emerged in the rest of Africa
as well as Asia, in the latter often in a neo-Gandhian idiom, and was
effectively suppressed in the postcolonial moment (Ajl & Sharma, 2022).
Yet, intellectual “structural adjustment” created gaps in Southern theo-
retical production, particularly around ecology. The insights from the
basic-needs-oriented industrialization literature of the 1980s, for example
in the dossiers of the International Foundation for Development

Alternatives are almost completely unmined in contemporary critiques
of capitalist industrial production. The recovery and building up of this
knowledge base as part of a civilizational and popular renewal project is
urgent and extends the cause of collaborative national liberations as part
of a national liberation movement.
Strikingly, the Pluriverse literature, which offers many distinct con-
tributions to thinking about development, offers almost no guidance
about modulating industrialization so that it becomes critical to without
overwhelming development planning. For example, there is a discussion
of “open access to information, products and technologies and who offer
open source solutions to environmental and resource problems,” which
touches on breaking intellectual property monopolies (D’Alisa, 2019;
Halpin, 2019). Silvia Ribeiro writes of how “technologies must be eco-
logically sustainable, culturally and locally appropriate, socially just,
and must integrate a gender perspective” (2019); others call for workers’
control. Yet the overall thrust does not seriously engage technology and
varieties of industrialization, frequently conflating industrialization with
capitalism and calling for a “post-industrial, alternative modernity”
(Toledo, 2019, p. 88).
While there are some serious proposals within this literature, it is
unclear how anyone outside state or para-state forces can muster
resources for research into national self-defense or health care, or provide
the national metallurgical institutions which are the basis for sovereign
development. It is also unclear what the Pluriverse literature imagines
for the almost 50% of poor humanity not living in the countryside, and
an even greater portion no longer engaged in direct primary production.
It is useless to berate extraction when productive processes for such large
sectors of the population to secure their social reproduction do not exist
or rely on capital and technology secured through industrial extraction.
A world of artisanal production and small-scale farming—while utterly
critical as a component of peripheral planning—cannot be generalized as
a path forward for most of humanity. Furthermore, current post-
development debate has rejected engagement with the macrostructure
of technological development, industrialization and decentralized devel-
opment models. As Fawzy Mansour (1979, p. 231ff) argued in the
context of naïve attempts at “decentralized” self-reliance,
[i]ngenuous…experiments with auto-centered, self-reliant development

schemes show that all attempts at engaging the peasants’ enthusiasm, organi-
zational ability, work capacity, and creativeness for communal productive
Ajl 39
endeavors on a purely local or partial basis which do not take into account the
all-persuasive surrounding socioeconomic conditions are doomed to failure
or frustration.
We cannot overlook earlier debates which rather than being reconsidered

are more often being repeated.
Conclusion
Political ecology has reached new stages of sophistication. But
many Northern theories—and Southern theories uplifted in the North—
continue to reject or sidestep the polarized nature of accumulation, disdain
particular paths to the universal, especially national liberation, and seldom
engage seriously with industrialization. Dominant models of “fossil
capital” essentially rehearse central elements of modernization theory
and the myth of development, implying a universal proletarianization
process where none is possible, lacking a serious class analysis of the
periphery, and positing either the “proletarian” as universal subject
or offering a deficient analysis which simply avoids class analysis
altogether in the contemporary moment, collapsing all global struggles
into the need for a “movement of movements” in a universal struggle
against climate change.
This article showed how within the post-development and extractiv-
ism literature, critiques of modernity and development continue to be
pervasive. Yet, this work cannot provide a serious program going forward
to deal with agrarian questions of ecology and social reproduction for the
twenty-first century. It has furthermore elaborated some ways of deepen-
ing and enriching EUE analysis so that it can better reflect the develop-
ment needs and serve national liberation in the twenty-first century. It has
elaborated some notes toward rethinking EUE in ways attentive to neoco-
lonialism, domestic class structures, and value theory. Furthermore, it has
considered how to articulate EUE findings concerning uneven flows with
Marxism in order to clarify distinctions between primitive accumulation
via imperialism or domestic violence with the inequality characteristic
of international trade relations in an imperialist world system.
Finally, this article has outlined some gaps in knowledge and pointed
toward theoretical and political questions which remain open in contem-
porary development literature. In particular, it has highlighted the need
for the return to and development of the classical literature around auto-
centered development, with, however, greater attention to the ecological
texture of working-class, peasant, and semi-proletariat production and
which productive forces can serve those people while avoiding excessive
harm to the non-human ecology.
Continuing to develop these insights—in particular through returning
to foundational literature about technology transfer, endogenous research
and development capacity, ecodevelopment, styles of development, and
appropriate technology, within an appropriate macroplanning frame-
work and nested in the biggest cause, national liberation, alongside the
generally unwalked peasant path to development—is now urgent as an
order of the day.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Lucas Koerner, Kai Heron, Phil McMichael, and Archana Prasad for
valuable feedback.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or
publication of this article.
ORCID iD
Max Ajl https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1422-1010
Notes
1. Although Marx, and peripheral theorists of development since the 1950s,
paid intense interest to the non-human environment, which has affected
subsequent revisions of political ecology—although with serious gaps
when it comes to noncore thinkers like Amilcar Cabral.
2. Leonardi and Torre, in their important analysis of Marxist ecology, do
not engage with the globally polarized nature of ecological crisis and
imperialism.
3. Concerns about limits to growth and population-control prescriptions
structured the late 1960s-early 1970s debates as well, but those analytical
positions were a refracted concern over the struggle of Third World com-
modity producers to demand a “fair share” of global resource use.
4. For some accounts, see (Jha et al., 2020; Ajl, 2021d). Samir Amin and
Marini are particularly absented in the Northern literature.
5. The more famous “fossil capitalism” theory seems to closely resemble
Altvater’s (2007) contribution, which suffers from similar problems,
although it is less boldly universalizing in its claims.
Ajl 41
6. We may see the methodological contrast between this Marxist form of

modernization theory and a holistic and iterative historical-theoretical pro-
cess in (McMichael, 2000).
7. This literature uniformly supports regime-change efforts, including oth-
ers in the same conglomerate deriding Iranian assistance to asymmetric
national liberation forces in Yemen as “sub-imperialism” (Collective,
2019).
8. Most technologies can be, at some level, recuperated by capitalists; agroe-
cology, for example, is a territory in dispute as there are wide-scale attempts
to enfold natural climate solutions and technical aspects of agro-ecology
into contemporary ruling-class programs.
9. Gudynas refers to monies received from extractive activities using the con-
cept of “surplus,” broken out into the “appropriation of the work and the
time of the people…the profits, the interests and the surplus value,” and
those related to the “extractivist surplus” that convert renewable and non-
renewable natural resources into capital (Gudynas, 2018, p. 70). Surplus
refers to components expressed in an “economic metric” and those which
cannot be measured: “the transfer of patrimonial loss and the impacts of
socio-environmental costs” (p. 70), an umbrella which includes “quality of
life” and the “integrity of ecosystems,” including exhaustion of nonrenewa-
ble resources (Gudynas, 2019, p. 43) As he writes, “extractivism implies an
accumulation of financialized or physical capital, while natural and social
capital is lost” (p. 47, our translation). Since he elsewhere writes of the
impossibility of putting a price on ecosystem integrity and well-being, it is
unclear why he lapses back into rhetoric of natural or social capital, since
attempts to put price tags on non-human nature sidestep that non-human
nature implies the limitless fungibility of exchange values, an antiecologi-
cal approach to ecology.
10. This paper cannot adequately enter the debate concerning ecological
civilization.
11. See Valiani (2021) for some elaboration of what is meant here, methodo-
logically speaking.
12. As Pluriverse (Acosta et al., 2019, p. xiv) notes, “The Marxist analysis
remains necessary but it is not sufficient; it needs to be complemented by
perspectives such as feminism and ecology, as well as imaginations ema-
nating from the global South, including Gandhian ideals.” It is odd to say
the least to suggest that Amin et al are not “imaginations emanating from
the…South.”
13. Jeffrey Webber adopts the reactionary language of the “Morales regime”;
see https://socialistproject.ca/2011/03/b479/. Pablo Solon and Raul Zibechi
try to present the US-supported coup d’etat in Bolivia as an organic mass
mobilization; see https://systemicalternatives.org/2019/11/11/what-hap-
pened-in-bolivia-was-there-a-coup/ and https://towardfreedom.org/story/
bolivia-the-extreme-right-takes-advantage-of-a-popular-uprising/
14. The dependency current is sharply distinct from what European Trotskyites
call “Third Worldism” in this respect. As Amin asked, “[w]ill the peoples
of the West, if they are not forced to it by the liberation of the periphery,be
disposed to renounce imperialism and face the long transition that will be
necessary before the advantages of their liberation from capitalism balance
the difficulties of reconversion? The least we can say is that the effect of
West-centeredness is to hide this cruel reality from the peoples of the West”
(1980, p. 202). This was written before the ramped-up class war against the
Western working class.
15. This literature is heterodox, however; see Frame (2022), Hickel (2018),
Schmelzer et al. (2022, pp. 51ff, 291).
16. See, for example, https://www.voguebusiness.com/sustainability/degrowth-
the-future-that-fashion-has-been-looking-for, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/
businessreview/2021/01/29/degrowth-inspires-business-model-innovation-
for-a-sustainable-post-covid-economy/, and https://hbr.org/2020/02/
why-de-growth-shouldnt-scare-businesses, WEF is also exploring the topic; see
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/06/what-is-degrowth-economics-
climate-change/
17. For when price suppression occurs on international markets, it is not a sur-
prise that the states which control and distribute natural resource rents would
resort to intensified natural resource extraction, giving rise to greater socio-
territorial conflicts, the problems which extractivism tries to theorize—a
theorization obliquely touched upon in older debates concerning internal
colonialism and the internally ecologically uneven effects of national-pop-
ular development, yet which retreats from dependency’s earlier attempts
to fuse global flows with local class structures and exploitation. Indeed,
when states are in a subordinate position in the global division of labor, it
is natural that they would in any case intensify resource extraction in order
to secure the capital needed for development (as occurred through Bolivian
poverty suppression).
18. So-called natural climate solutions could indeed value the labor of bio-
diversity preservation directly through the wage but simultaneously
super-exploit.
19. The material from the Founex Report to the Cocoyoc Declaration and the
writings of Abdallah (1976) and Samir Amin (1980), amongst others, make
this clear.
20. Indeed, however one characterizes the contemporary Chinese social forma-
tion, it is set to peak its CO2 emissions by 2025.
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Article

Theories of Political Agrarian South: Journal of

Ecology: Monopoly 12(1) 12–50, 2023

Capital Against and Education for South (CARES)

People and the in.sagepub.com/journals-permissions-india

insurrection (Yeros, 2021); the presence of newly radicalized states, such

development and polarized accumulation more broadly. While “extrac-

Imperialism or Fossil Capitalism?

discussion, with accompanying Eurocentrism, methodological national-

capitalist property relations is homologous…time as incorporeal reposi-

distinct orientations to the productive apparatus, or primarily or solely

Capitalist Industrialization Against Nature:

exploitation more broadly. Superficially, these theories take seriously

Furthermore, this literature underplays the achievements of the radical

Each interpretive decision places the burden of political transforma-

monopoly capital has deformed socialist construction, and less to actu-

for transformation (Vastinjan, 2018, 2021); EUE and climate debt;

US–EU agenda of leaning on Latin American grassroots struggles to see

use of atmospheric space and planetary capacity to absorb and metabo-

Such unevenness is real, yet needs to be theorized using dependency/

ecological destruction into value theory systematically. Marx brought

[a]s in imperialist war, the degradation of nature by capital, the incarnation

Capital both relies on and undermines those forms of social nature

reproduction, and the need for “liberation from dependency…national

The National and Agrarian Questions: What Kind of

monopoly capital. It was revolutionary and could only be achieved by

basis for radicalized oil exporters to play a powerful role in transforming

regional-level planning toward national or collective self-reliant devel-

an analytical populism, forfeiting the role of theory in clarifying prac-

What Kinds of Industrialization?

pressures. Fewer Soviet emissions would have registered in a smaller

in the dossiers of the International Foundation for Development

[i]ngenuous…experiments with auto-centered, self-reliant development

We cannot overlook earlier debates which rather than being reconsidered

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

6. We may see the methodological contrast between this Marxist form of

Abdel-Malek, A. (1985). Taghyīr al-‘ālam, al-Majlis al-Wa»anī lil-Thaqāfah

Dussel, E. D. (1988). Hacia un Marx desconocido: Un comentario de los manu-

Malm, A. (2021). How to blow up a pipeline. Verso.

Schmalzer, S. (2016). Red revolution, green revolution: Scientific farming in

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