Kai Heron - “The Great Unfettering”
▻https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/the-great-unfettering
Highly recommended article—a richly-cited critique of ecomodernism, methodological nationalism and the lack of anti-imperialism in many ecosocialist models.
[Matt Huber’s] approach leads [him] into a false choice between a politics that attends to imperialist domination and one focussed on class struggle. As anti-colonial Marxists such as Walter Rodney, Samir Amin and Sam Moyo have long argued, this is to ignore one of the fundamental issues of working-class politics today: the national self-determination of oppressed peoples.
As Heron later summarises:
In 1848 Marx and Engels wrote that ‘the proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie’. This, I would hazard, is what animates Huber’s approach to Marxist politics. But by 1869 Marx had come to realize that for workers in colonial countries, this would be impossible without first tackling the colonial question that divided the world’s working classes into ‘hostile camps’. As Marx argued, and as history verified, workers often have conflicting interests that pose a challenge to the kind of mass mobilization that Huber envisions. His image of the ‘planetary proletariat’ is not attuned to how conflicting interests, misogyny, racism and chauvinism drive a wedge between workers. It refuses to acknowledge that shared interests, far from being an objective reality, must be composed in and through struggle.
[Bold is mine]
Heron argues, instead, for an “anti-imperialist eco-communism”, concluding that:
Such a politics must do the difficult work of developing strategies of struggle and ecological transition that meet the needs of the exploited and oppressed in the Global North in ways that are compatible with demands for colonial reparations, technology transfers, food sovereignty, land back, the lifting of sanctions, the end of occupations and the atmospheric space to develop freely and independently. This knotty problem can neither be wished away nor delayed until the US working class has won a Green New Deal. Huber is right that capital’s pursuit of profit is a fetter on our collective liberation. What he misses is that eco-modernism similarly fetters a world of flourishing for all.