
Many artistic works presented in this edition, and at this festival in general, engage with ecological issues. The engagement of international artists in environmental topics not only addresses concerns but also sheds a light on societies and complex socio-economic systems shaped by specific, often colonial histories. The American philosopher Nancy Fraser has long been concerned with the circumstances and challenges of neoliberal societies. In this essay, she describes how these systems undermine their own foundations and advocates for a new, environmentally sustainable and socially just economic model – one that brings together diverse perspectives and connects economic thinking with ecological awareness.
Today, ecopolitics is all over the map: it is a large and confused field, containing multiple perspectives that diverge and conflict. There are young activists like Greta Thunberg, who demand immediate radical action on carbon emissions; movements for degrowth that pin the rap on consumerist lifestyles and propose to transform our ways of living; indigenous communities defending their habitats from corporate extractivism and advocating non-instrumental ways of relating to nature; feminists who mobilize for forms of life that sustain reproduction; and Black Lives militants who target environmental racism. The field also contains social democrats who militate for a Green New Deal; rightwing populists who aim to preserve «their own» green spaces and natural resources by excluding (racialized) «others»; corporate and financial interests that speculate in eco-commodities and aim to ensure the global climate regime remains market-centered and capital-friendly. Finally, ecopolitics also includes climate change deniers.
One possible order for this unsettled and chaotic field would pit «the environmentalism of the rich» against «the environmentalism of the poor». The latter expression was used by Joan Martinez-Alier to refer to the struggles of poor communities (mainly but not only in the Global South) to counter neo-imperial corporate assaults on their natural surroundings, not qua abstract «Nature» but as habitats inextricably entwined with their ways of life, their sources of livelihood, community, social reproduction and political identity. In other words: the environmentalism of the poor is integrated, bringing together a whole set of existential concerns. Rather than separate out harms to (nonhuman) nature, it treats these as deeply entangled with harms to human communities.
By contrast, what I call the environmentalism of the rich is environmentalism as «Nature Defense», uncontaminated by any other, «extraneous» concerns, such as social justice, livelihood security, democracy, social reproduction of human communities. Of course, these concerns appear «extraneous» only to a small elite, whose livelihoods, political rights and community survival are NOT existentially threatened.
This presupposes a split of «the economy» from the latter’s non-economic background conditions – including nature. Our social formation which is best described as «capitalist society» establishes a contradictory relation between those realms. On the one hand, the accumulation of capital relies on nature – both as a «tap,» which supplies material and energic inputs to commodity production, and as a «sink» for absorbing the latter’s waste. On the other, capitalist society incentivizes owners bent on maximizing profits to commandeer «nature’s gifts» as cheaply as possible, while absolving them of any obligation to replenish what they take or repair what they damage. Premised on the false assumption that nature can replenish itself autonomously and without end, capital sets up an extractive relation to nature, consuming ever more biophysical wealth in order to pile up ever more profits. What piles up as well, and not accidentally, is an ever-growing mountain of eco-wreckage. There is, in effect, an ecological contradiction lodged at the heart of capitalist society, built into its DNA.
Conceptually, these two categories, the «environmentalism of the poor» and the «environmentalism of the rich», form an opposing pair; they stand in opposition to one another. «Rich» and «poor» are populist surrogates for class categories. Like all populist language, they are simplified and lacking in analytical precision. But they have great mobilizing power in part because they direct our attention to the social formation in which ecopolitics plays out. Contra those who speak of «anthropogenic climate change», the principal agent of global warming is not humanity in general, but the small class who engineer and profit from the system of production and transport that is bombarding the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. They haven’t done this contingently, as a result of some freak accident. Rather, they have been strongly incentivized by a social system that gives them means, motive and opportunity to savage the planet. The terms rich and poor rightly suggest that this is a deeply unjust social formation in which a relatively small number of humans live comfortably and long while the vast majority suffer. We cannot save the planet without disabling some core, defining features of our social order. Hence, my first conclusion: Ecopolitics must be anti-capitalist.
But that is not all. Capitalism’s ecological contradiction is entangled with several others, equally structural and deeply entrenched. Capitalist society accords care work little if any (monetized) value, treats it as free and infinitely available, and assumes no responsibility for sustaining it. It is therefore inherently prone to destabilize social reproduction – just as it tends non-accidentally to destabilize natural ecosystems. In fact, the two processes are hard to separate. When capital destabilizes the ecosystems that support human habitats, it simultaneously jeopardizes caregiving as well as the livelihoods and social relations that sustain it. When people fight back, conversely, it is often to defend the entire ecosocial nexus at a single stroke, as if to defy the authority of capitalism’s divisions. Crises of nature and crises of care are intertwined.
The same thing holds for capital’s relation to labor – in all of its forms: Nature and labor are internally related. I don’t mean «only» that human laborers are themselves biosocial beings – hence part of nature, although of course we are. (I mean also that nature is a condition of labor, supplying the material substrate that labor transforms: the «raw materials,» the «productive» and «reproductive» «inputs» – including land, tools, machines, people, and other animals. In addition, nature supplies the energy that powers labor, including the foodstuffs that power human and animal muscle and the fossilized and renewable sources of energy that power machines.) Equally important, labor relies on general environmental conditions – on breathable air, potable water, fertile soil, relatively stable sea levels, a habitable climate. Finally, nature is the setting and site of the societies and communities that live from and organize labor. Absent nature, there is no society, hence no social labor. Nature and labor, in sum, form a couple.
But the labor movements seem to be quite separate from the environmental movements that claim to represent nature. Effectively divided from one another, the two sets of movements are weakened, as their interests appear to conflict. In the zero-sum metrics of capitalism, labor’s interests depend on «jobs,» which themselves depend on profitable investment opportunities, which depend in turn on capital’s freedom to take what it wants from nature with no obligation to replenish or repair. In this scenario, labor’s interests appear directly opposed to «nature’s interests.» The truth is that any movement that stands for the cause of labor must be green, committed to sustaining and repairing nature. And conversely, any movement for sustaining and repairing nature must embrace the cause of labor. Only if each side rediscovers and embraces its «other half» can we heal the rift introduced by capital between labor and nature. Hence, my second conclusion: Ecopolitics must not only be anti-capitalist, but also trans-environmental and hence multidimensional.
The study of capitalism’s history confirms that ecological questions cannot be separated from questions of political power, gender and racial oppression, imperial domination, and indigenous dispossession and genocide, nor from questions of livelihood, community, and social reproduction. It shows too that struggles over nature have almost always been deeply entangled with struggles over labor, care, race, and political power. «The environment» cannot be adequately protected without disturbing the institutional framework and structural dynamics of capitalist society.
Which brings us to the burning question: Will we squander our chance to save the planet by failing to build an ecopolitics that is anti-capitalist and trans-environmental? Everything depends on whether we can develop a clear and convincing perspective that connects all our present woes, ecological and otherwise, to one and the same social system – and through that to one another.
Nancy Fraser is a Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research in New York. Her work addresses issues of social justice, redistribution, and recognition. She is considered one of the most important American theorists in this field. Her most recent book, «Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do About It», was published in german by Suhrkamp in 2023.