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https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957221075323
Politics
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DOI: 10.1177/02633957221075323
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Eco-socialism will be
anti-eugenic or it will be
nothing: Towards equal
exchange and the end of
population
Lisa Tilley
SOAS University of London, UK
Max Ajl
Wageningen University, The Netherlands
Abstract
In this article, we draw attention to similarities and synergies between eco-fascist and liberal
forms of populationism which encourage reproductive injustices against Indigenous women and
women of colour globally, increasingly in the name of climate change mitigation. Calls to intervene
in the bodily and social autonomy of racialised women, at best, distract from ecological crisis
and, at worst, encourage violent forms of reproductive injustice. We urge instead for an honest
reckoning with the root problem of ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) as the system of global
extraction, which enacts environmental harm and reproductive injustice. Finally, we call for an
anti-imperialist eco-socialist move towards equal exchange on a world scale to end the flow of
undervalued resources from the South and to limit the contaminating activities these enable.
We also stress that an anti-imperialist eco-socialism needs to be attuned to the teachings of
reproductive justice movements and resistant to creeping liberal eugenicism, as much as to the
overt eco-fascism which has proved so deadly in recent years.
Keywords
climate change, ecofascism, eco-socialism, populationism, race
Received: 12th August 2021; Revised version received: 25th November 2021; Accepted: 6th December 2021
As Bikrum Gill (2021: 1, this volume) argues, ‘race underwrites the distinctively exhaus-
tive society/nature relation fuelling . . . the productive excess and ecological exhaustion
of the capitalist world-system’. To accept and extend Gill’s claim, we argue that race
Corresponding author:
Lisa Tilley, Development Studies, SOAS University of London, London WC1H 0XG, UK.
Email: LT28@soas.ac.uk
1075323POL0010.1177/02633957221075323PoliticsTilley and Ajl
research-article2022
Special Issue: Race & Climate Change
2 Politics 00(0)
underwrites many of the dominant solutions and novel innovations of governance devel-
oped within the frame of environmentalism and in response to the urgency of climate
change, particularly in relation to the enduring construction of ‘overpopulation’ as an
environmental problem. To substantiate this, we revisit how ‘population’ – already a term
for racialised groups developed through colonial management – became re-articulated
with ‘environment’ in key formative publications in environmental studies due to the
efforts of white nationalists in the mid- to late-20th century. Absent any serious reckoning
with this lineage, liberal environmentalism continues to launder effectively white nation-
alist priorities into their policy-oriented analyses. Here we trace this relationship from the
white nationalist populationism of Garrett Hardin through to the liberal environmentalist
populationism of Partha Dasgupta.
We situate this population fix as the necessary ideological thimblerig that justifies a
capitalist world-system structured to extract value and resources from peoples of colour
in the periphery – extraction which super-exploits and degrades peripheral labour, social
orders, and ecologies, and drives migration to the core.1 Such flows are then remoulded
and represented as natural facts and threatening forces to northern audiences through
populationist discourses to justify border violence and political exclusion (see Turner and
Bailey, 2021).
The first section of this article revisits ‘population’ as a racialised ‘managerial noun’
(Murphy, 2017: 135), which prepares the ground for coercive reproductive interventions
in the name of ecology. Here we consider the synergy and reciprocity which connect
ecofascism with liberalism through the foundational white nationalist populationism of
figures like Garrett Hardin. The second section uses the lens of ecologically unequal
exchange (EUE) to bring into focus the system of extraction and exploitation, which con-
nects environmental harm and reproductive injustice. The third focusses on some ele-
ments of an anti-eugenic and anti-imperialist eco-socialism, using historical Third World
documents that raised and dismissed the population-development nexus, and contempo-
rary struggles which are the mooring for a committed programme towards global devel-
opmental convergence. We conclude by reasserting that an anti-imperialist eco-socialism
needs to be attuned to the teachings of reproductive justice movements and resistant to
creeping liberal eugenicism as much as to the overt eco-fascism which has proved so
deadly in recent years.
From replacement narratives to reproductive interventions
On 15 March 2019, a self-described ‘Ethno-nationalist Ecofascist’ murdered 51 Muslim
worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand (Forchtener, 2019). The white
Australian killer distributed a ‘manifesto’ titled The Great Replacement wherein he
lamented the destruction of the environment due to ‘overpopulation’. Although he spe-
cifically targeted Muslims in an atrocity rightly identified as Islamophobic, the killer’s
manifesto made a broader and all-too-familiar separation between whites and people of
colour in his understanding of population. Referring to ‘Western’ and ‘white’ nations he
bemoaned dwindling white fertility rates in opposition to non-white ‘races’ with ‘higher
fertility rates’ who seek to ‘ethnically replace my own people’. In the killer’s own words:
the environment is being destroyed by over population, [sic] we Europeans are one of the groups
that are not over populating the world. The invaders are the ones over populating the world. Kill
the invaders, kill the overpopulation and by doing so save the environment.2
Tilley and Ajl 3
The manifesto’s ideology is often traced back to a 2011 work of Renaud Camus, titled
Le Grand Remplacement, and understood as a sibling of US white genocide conspiracies.
However, the basic ideas which inspired the Christchurch massacre have much deeper
roots. European colonial projects, which governed most of the world through force and
violence for much of the past 400 years – the politics of accumulation on a world scale –
developed the abiding categories of population and the technologies to control those cat-
egorised. Beginning with a political dissection of the world along what Du Bois (2008
[1903] 3) called ‘the color line’ between those racialised as white and those racialised as
non-white, colonial projects cast ‘population’ as an object to be managed ‘scientifically’.
In the early 20th century, British colonial administrations became increasingly concerned
about the racial balance of power across the white/non-white colour line (see Ittmann,
2013) fixating on perceived low white birth rates relative to the higher fertility rates
among communities of colour in restive colonies. These concerns over the racial balance
of power motivated the development of techniques of demographic calculation, and
today, the technologies of population measurement crafted in the service of colonial pro-
jects remain baked into the discipline of demography.
By the mid-20th century, foundational figures in environmental scholarship, influ-
enced by a range of Malthusian, eugenicist, economistic,3 and white supremacist ideolo-
gies, were embedding population concerns into disciplinary structures. Furthermore,
indeed critically, these foundational environmental studies scholars driving population-
ism were responding to the Third World national liberation/Bandung project and its atten-
dant threats to unfettered and cheap imperial access to resources from former colonies
(Greene, 2019). As a key example, one of the most widely taught and widely cited texts
in environmental studies and related fields is The Tragedy of the Commons written by
Garrett Hardin in 1968 (see Bhatia, 2004; Oakes, 2016). Seeping into everyday usage,
even the title itself has become something of a cliché. However, rarely is it acknowledged
that Hardin was an open and vocal white nationalist who invested environmental texts
with racist logics (see Bhatia, 2004; Mildenberger, 2019; SPLC, n.d.). The Tragedy of the
Commons exhorted population control in terms such as: ‘freedom to breed will bring ruin
to all’; while his truly cold-blooded 1974 essay Lifeboat Ethics advocates for the aban-
donment of the populous poor to save the rich few in a limited planetary ‘lifeboat’. Garrett
Hardin, like others who shared his views, such as Richard Lynn and J. Phillippe Rushton,4
contributed to the development of the journal Population and Environment (Bhatia,
2004). Still published today by Springer, the archive of Population and Environment
remains littered with texts informed by white nationalism and scientific racism.
If white nationalists and scientific racists were vital in shaping the disciplinary priori-
ties of environmental studies, the transfer of ideas has also been reciprocal. So, in turn,
what Bhatia (2004: 194) calls ‘reactionary ecology and the politics of population control’
have long fed back into the nationalist environmental arguments of organised white
supremacy in the United States and beyond. Those familiar with the open climate denial-
ism of the Trump years in the United States might find this somewhat incongruous.
However, white nationalist eco-fascism and related movements are less in contradiction
with, and more a complement to, ‘fossil fascist’ movements, which have been especially
visible under Trump. Both pivot on ‘population’ concerns, are violently anti-immigration,
and both seek to preserve white majorities through hard borders while discounting life
outside of those borders in the Global South as sacrificial. Equally, both seek to preserve
an imperial ‘way of life’ based on privileged access to global wealth.
4 Politics 00(0)
For Hardin and others, the academic sphere has been a domain for laundering racist
agendas into citable concepts, which pass as respectable. And many liberal environmen-
talists have been only too willing to uncritically incorporate those ideas into their own
work. One of the most recent liberal interventions into the environmental policy domain
in the United Kingdom, The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review by econo-
mist Partha Dasgupta is a key example of the laundering of white nationalist priorities
into establishment liberalism. Taking Hardin as the accepted base for analysis, Dasgupta
advances an assessment of threats to biodiversity which devotes much time to the ‘prob-
lem’ of Global South, and particularly ‘African’, fertility.
Dasgupta’s report is an exercise in economism and calculation in which all biotic life
has an accounting value, working on the principle that ‘nature’ cannot be valued at all
unless quantified in this way. Using the abstractions of liberal economics, in which people
are conceived of as utility-maximising individuals, Dasgupta (2021a: 232) compares
‘reproductive behaviour’ in the Global South with ‘consumption practices’ in the Global
North as similarly egoistic personal choices, notwithstanding one key difference: Global
South reproductive behaviour is accelerated by what he presents as improper communal
social forms. Taking Hardin’s work as a point of departure, the report claims: ‘conformist
preferences over reproductive behaviour can amplify the tragedy of the commons’
(Dasgupta, 2021a: 234). Here, the white nationalist imperative behind the political choice
to split humanity down the colour line and identify the reproduction of people of colour
as the problem to be solved through intervention is stripped away by Dasgupta, leaving a
seemingly innocuous statement fit for liberal analysis.5
Dasgupta also pushes back against the apparent advances made by reproductive rights
movements in the past three decades. Indeed, for today’s Malthusian, eugenicist, and
economistic commentators on population, the 1994 International Conference on
Population and Development in Cairo remains a focus of antipathy for what it appeared
to achieve. The conference established reproductive rights as fundamental to family plan-
ning initiatives, replacing the overt coercion of older population control interventions. In
fact, the Cairo shift from coercion to rights has simply meant that coercive practices, such
as pressure to take long-term injected or implanted contraception, are often couched in
terms of individual feminist choice and control (see Wilson, 2017). Yet even this ‘strate-
gic appropriation’ (Wilson, 2017: 57) of the language of women’s rights is a step in the
wrong direction for Dasgupta.
Referring to the ‘Impact Inequality’, which he defines as ‘the imbalance between our
demands and Nature’s supply’, Dasgupta (2021b: 1) works to extend Amartya Sen’s pres-
entation of pollution as oppression to incorporate population as oppression:
In a world where the Impact Inequality holds, and holds strongly, it may seem reasonable to
insist on the rights of future generations when an appeal is made to curb our impact on the
biosphere. Sen (1982), for example, likened persistent pollutants to instruments of oppression:
‘Lasting pollution is a kind of calculable oppression of the future generation’. But if additional
births can be expected to contribute further to the discharge of persistent pollutants, why does a
couple’s reproductive rights trump the rights of future people not to be oppressed? That is the
kind of ethical dilemma the language of reproductive rights misses. (Dasgupta, 2021a: 193)
Here, reproduction itself is reformulated as oppression in a critique of the reproductive
rights framework which the author sees as infringing on the ‘Impact Inequality’ between
human demand and nature’s supply. The report remains focussed on calculating an
Tilley and Ajl 5
absolute number of humans rather than on the relative impact of humans on the biosphere,
based on their relationship to the means of production and their insertion in patterns of
accumulation on a world scale. Indeed, unmentioned is the fact that the carbon emissions
produced by higher fertility and poorer societies are comparably negligible, as we explain
later.
Typical of liberal analysts, Dasgupta does not directly order states and organisations to
replicate coercive population control measures. However, like many academics identify-
ing ‘overpopulation’ problems, he does prepare the ground and direct the reader towards
potential areas for intervention. The report proceeds to home in on ‘Africa’, and specifi-
cally ‘Sub-Saharan Africa’ as a site for legitimate intervention. In this part of the world,
understood in broad brush racialised generalisations, timeless ‘traditions’ are identified as
being at the roots of high fertility, including: ‘kinship-held agricultural land, the practice
of polygamy, lack of access to modern methods of contraception, low education among
women, and kinship obligations to share the fruits of effort’ (Dasgupta, 2021a: 242).
Dasgupta pinpoints kinship structures and the lack of nuclear families as key factors gen-
erating high fertility in ‘Africa’. The reason for this, in the liberal economistic worldview,
has to be that the ‘costs borne by parents are lower when childrearing is shared among kin
than when households are nuclear’. Continuing with this line of argument, Dasgupta
states:
Fosterage creates a free-rider problem if the parents’ share of the benefits from having children
exceeds their share of the costs. The corresponding externalities are confined to the kinship.
Other things equal, reduction in those externalities would be accompanied by a fall in the
demand for children. (Dasgupta, 2021a: 242 [emphasis added])
Behind this mention, dressed up in the language of externalities, is the suggestion that
interventions should go far beyond contraceptive programmes and restructure kinship-
based societies. If such communities can be steered towards more individuated and
nuclear family-centred ways of being, parents would have to take sole responsibility for
their own biological children, eliminating the ‘free-rider problem’ that communal support
structures supposedly create. Overall, tools of economic calculation are applied sweep-
ingly to African women’s private and collective lives to suggest the optimum level of
reproduction according to Dasgupta’s sums.
The underlying assumption is that external Western-dominated states and institutions
could and should intervene to alter the structures of ‘African’ society to limit reproduction
among those whose production activities impact most lightly on the environment. This
evidences the racial structures of the international and its hierarchies of sovereignty.
Shifting race, nation, class and gender hierarchies enduring from the colonial era deter-
mine who assumes the power of intervention; who becomes the sacrificial object of inter-
vention; who has bodily and social autonomy, and whose body and community are
designated as sites of intervention. Such structural hierarchies determine whose present-
day reproductive rights and freedoms are marked as sacrificial in the name of the ‘future
generations’ of others. Furthermore, the character of intervention to these ends is informed
by existing repertoires of thought on population, which are firmly rooted in anti-poor,
misogynistic, and racist projects.
Dasgupta’s population fixation seems all the more abhorrent given that the wealthier
countries with below replacement birth rates of about 1.9 per woman were responsible for
86% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2018. The 9% of the global population with
6 Politics 00(0)
birth rates of around 4.6 were responsible for only 0.5% of global emissions in the same
year (see Ritchie, 2018 for emissions by region and World Bank, 2019, for fertility rates
by region). Clearly, the ecological impact of the high fertility poorest is negligible and
Dasgupta’s obliquely suggested interventions into African fertility and social organisa-
tion would bring no discernible ecological benefits. Counterarguments hold that, regard-
less of low emissions per capita, the populous poor encroach on land and resources,
accelerating Third World biodiversity loss. However, these arguments neglect to consider
the vast and ever-expanding acreage dedicated to producing livestock feed, food crops,
biofuels and similar commodities for export to high-consumption areas of the low-fertil-
ity First World. The blame for biodiversity loss lies with such commodity production and
the capitalist system in which it is embedded, not the subsistence of the poorest
communities.
Third World thinkers in particular have shown how the reservation of land for extrac-
tion relates back to ‘overpopulation’ interventions. One rationale is that such efforts might
suppress poorer populations’ resource needs and make it easier to funnel resources to
northern populations and northern accumulation. As Amin once argued, ‘If the masses of
the Third World could divert these resources and exploit them for their own benefit, the
conditions under which the capitalist system functions at the center would be upset’
(1977: 358). Patnaik (2007) develops this reasoning further, writing in the Ideology of
Overpopulation, that population increase disturbs wealthy countries because ‘it will nec-
essarily mean that these countries will absorb a slightly higher share of the scarce or non-
renewable resources whose world supply has been successfully hogged by the advanced
countries so far’. To loop this back to what we know about the racial formation of demo-
graphic calculation: there is a connection between the racial balance of power in demo-
graphic terms and the racial balance of power in resource terms which connects to the
paradoxically enduring fragility of the extractive global system.
Although figures like Dasgupta often present populationism as simply an abstract
debate, in reality this inspires often coercive, and even deadly, interventions in the repro-
ductive autonomy of working-class, racialised, and lower caste women (and sometimes
men). Technologies of sterilisation and coercive reproductive restriction established
under colonial states were further developed and extended across racialised, Third World
and Indigenous communities, often under the banner of ‘development’. For example,
after the French decided not to develop the industrial base in its overseas department of
Reunion Island, without need for labour the area was recast as ‘overpopulated’, and the
state oversaw ‘thousands of abortions without consent’ in the 1960s and 1970s (Vergès,
2020: 1). Across Turtle Island (the United States and Canada), forced sterilisation has
long been part of successive settler colonial state extermination projects against Indigenous
communities and has extended into recent times (Clarke, 2021). Fifteen women died
within the same week in 2014 after being subjected to sterilisations in postcolonial India,
where millions of Dalit, Indigenous Adivasi, and poor women are subjected to tubecto-
mies in dangerous sterilisation camps (Wilson, 2018: 91). From 1996 to 2001, the
Peruvian state sterilised over 272,000 Indigenous and poor women and over 22,000
Indigenous and poor men in a campaign of ‘institutionalised genocide’ in the guise of
family planning (Carranza Ko, 2020: 91, 95). With such violent cases in mind, reproduc-
tive justice movements, developed by women of colour and Indigenous women, seek to
secure rights to have, or not to have, children, as well as to secure the conditions neces-
sary to give birth and raise healthy children (Ross and SisterSong, 2009: 4). These move-
ments increasingly converge with environmental justice objectives as coercive
Tilley and Ajl 7
reproductive restrictions become ever more commonly enacted or gestured towards in the
name of climate change.
Overall, an environmentalism which mobilises population is, at best, a racially struc-
tured distraction from the colonial-capitalist roots of the ecological problem: ongoing
racially structured EUE (extraction). In short, ‘population’ distracts from meaningful
solutions to ecological crisis. Populationism framed as environmentalism also serves
those who fixate on the racial balance of power in demographic and resource-use terms.
And at worst, it provides grounds for harmful interventions into the bodies and social
lives of women of colour in the Global South, which has extensive and violent precedent.
The next section thus mobilises theories of the production of North-South polarisation to
establish the world order’s reliance on permanent differentiation and obdurate disparities
in resource use and environmental harm, both intra-nationally between classes and inter-
nationally between national aggregates.
Unequal exchange and ecological crisis
The ecological crisis is rooted in an extractive, uneven, and polarised process of global
accumulation. Here, we draw on EUE, as well as cognate and antecedent Third World
approaches, to clarify the dynamics of this process. EUE identifies global extractive
structures which synchronously feed excessive Global North consumption with under-
valued commodities and labour from the Global South, enclose global atmospheric com-
mons (Sharife, 2011), and displace ecological harm disproportionately onto the South, as
part-and-parcel of accumulation on a world scale. Producing and maintaining this system
has also been bound up with managing the reproduction of racialised populations, from
the engineered reproduction of plantation labour, to the arrested reproduction through
forced sterilisation of Indigenous residents on land marked for primitive accumulation.
Ecology, extraction, and population are braided together within the world system, and
how these relations are interpreted and acted upon is political.
Clearly, the relevant unit of analysis to understand capitalism and its effects on the
climate is the globe. We use EUE to diagnose the origins, manifestations, and futures of
this global climate crisis. EUE itself emerged as an ecological turn in world-systems the-
ory, which emphasised core-periphery or core/semi-periphery/periphery interaction
(Bunker, 1988; Frey et al., 2019). World-systems theory rightly noted that the development
of the world-system was a historical and global class struggle. Colonialism was central to
value concentration in the core, with ‘European representations of others remain[ing]
marked by this polarization, and in fact serv[ing] as a means of justifying it’ (Amin, 1989:
176). Accordingly, the underdevelopment of the periphery was not due to immanent
defects or lags in its development process. Because peripheries lose value through core
territorial and mercantile aggrandisement, underdevelopment and development were, and
are, two sides of the same world-historical coin (Amin, 1974). Contemporaneous Third
World ecological manifestoes echoed such concerns, making clear the environmental crisis’s
primary roots ‘in economic and social structures and behaviour within and between coun-
tries’, in the words of The Cocoyoc Declaration (1974). As the document argued, ‘the very
cheapness of the materials was one element in encouraging the industrialized nations to
indulge in careless and extravagant use of the imported materials’. This position illumi-
nated then-prominent theories of uneven exchange, and foreshadowed later EUE argu-
ments, upon which we now draw.
8 Politics 00(0)
EUE clarifies that capitalism, whether in its colonial or imperialist stages, has meant
unequal exchange of energy and biophysical matter, alongside well-known inequalities in
embodied labour through uneven exchange (Emmanuel, 1972).6 EUE shows that the
price system, including the limitless fungibility of exchange values, facilitates core import
of materials and semi-finished or finished products. The socio-physical technics of
‘development’ are the ‘result . . . of the societal flows of resources which reproduce, and
are reproduced by, these entities’ (Hornborg, 2009: 242). Global terms of trade and une-
qual exchange keep the physical artefacts of the core running, while obscuring how those
terms of trade impact the periphery. The law of value, bodyguarded by constant violence
and interventions, facilitates the core’s import of value and export of entropy, and the
periphery’s export of value and import of entropy. Ongoing development in the North
means human and ecological de-development or underdevelopment in the South. CO2
emissions, for now the ineluctable output of growth, also produce climate change-induced
de-development (Roberts and Parks, 2006).
The physical system of EUE dates back to the colonial period, when the goods which
facilitated northern development began to be extracted from the physical landscapes and
human beings of the South. From this period onwards, as Fanon (1985 [1961]: 81)
famously put it, Europe was remade as ‘literally the creation of the Third World’. European
colonisers deployed a civilising mission rhetoric, ostensibly to bring ‘improvement’ to
‘environmental disarray’ – in reality, bringing degradation to sustainable Indigenous ecol-
ogies – to justify colonial aggrandisement. As the colonial era wore on, the fields and
labour of the people of Java, the Deccan, Egypt, and elsewhere produced physical com-
modities, imported into the core, used in manufacturing, or re-sold – the ‘ghost acreage’
of metropolitan consumption (Ajl, 2021a; Borgstrom, 1974; Tilley, 2020). Wealth drained
as the core-periphery pair hardened (Bagchi, 2008). Core imports from the periphery
were largely agricultural, especially tropical goods like sugar, spices, and tea ungrowable
in northern climates, and teak and other timbers, inducing widespread and ecologically
catastrophic deforestation (Gadgil and Guha, 1993). Plantation monocrop cultivation sys-
tems also produced rapid ecological degradation, developmental disarray, and/or colonial
genocide in franchise colonies like India and Indonesia (Patnaik, 2018; Tilley, 2020).
European expansionist projects also instigated settler-colonial genocide by means of
colonial disease-spreading and direct territorial conquest through the settling of the ‘fron-
tier’ (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014). Central to extractive and settler colonial projects has been the
differential management of ethnic groups as racialised ‘populations’ to be diminished or
reproduced in direct relation to colonial economic objectives (Bendix, 2016; TallBear,
2018). Over the course of these colonial centuries, Europe developed extermination tech-
niques to be used against those racialised in relation to land to facilitate expropriation and
the consolidation of settlement. In tandem, colonial powers developed techniques to
coerce reproduction among those racialised in relation to the category of ‘labour’ for
exhaustion on monocultural plantations and in extractive industries. To stress our point
here: the emergence of ‘population’ as the management of racialised biological group-
ings, which contemporary figures like Dasgupta still mobilise in the present, is thor-
oughly bound up with the extractive systems which bestowed ecological crisis upon us in
the first place.
Colonial territorial extremities also worked in tandem. Core wealth extraction from the
franchise-colonial peripheries exported goods to the European core, which re-exported
them to its own settler colonies. The core exported domestic social contradictions in the
form of the European working-class as a surplus or ‘redundant’ population fix. The
Tilley and Ajl 9
extirpation of social systems through colonisation radically changed ecologies (Cronon
and Demos, 2003; Merchant, 1989) and ripped apart modes of socio-ecological regula-
tion, which required human tending to facilitate value drains to the core (Anderson, 2005;
Estes, 2019). Such colonial drains of value, not least through the exhaustion of the periph-
ery’s agricultural land, along with managed movements of populations, produced the
current world-system in both economic and ecological terms.
Importantly, colonial drains also produced the world-system in a very specific way,
eliciting a transformation of the energy regime. That regime, against other ones, began to
draw on the historically sedimented products of past photosynthesis – hydrocarbons. By
enhancing the energetic basis of accumulation, it laid the basis for the emergence of
British industrial capitalism. Yet from industrial capitalism’s dawn, burnt coal appropri-
ated atmospheric commons with longue durée effects on the periphery of the world-sys-
tem, which have only recently become apparent in the deadly effects of the climate crisis.
At least initially unknowingly, European industrial capitalism was not merely pillaging
and de-developing the colonised South, but also appropriating the future through enclos-
ing the atmospheric space available for ‘cheap’ paths to development (Warlenius, 2018).
The postcolonial period saw transformations in the world division of labour through
outsourced and offshored production, which superficially and partially shifted the locus
of CO2 emissions but maintained the magnitude and direction of the value flows, which
ensured uneven development on a world scale. Overall, the period after Global South
nations won their independence, especially from 1970, witnessed massively increased
human appropriation of net primary production alongside rising intra-national and inter-
national income inequality, and displaced ecological loads (Haberl et al., 2006). Within
this picture, we broadly separate out transformations within agricultural and industrial
circuits of production – although a central component of escalating environmental dam-
ages is the industrialisation of southern agricultures.
Until 1960, the United States, Western Europe, and Japan were overwhelmingly
responsible for overall CO2 emissions because of their relatively early industrialisation
and accompanying use of coal and oil, domination of atmospheric ‘space’ for the wastes,
and appropriation of global primary productivity. In the late 20th century, shifts began to
take place which generated rising CO2 emissions in the periphery and semi-periphery too.
Nonetheless, the core continued to concentrate the ‘clean’, higher value components of
the value chain, increasingly boasting of clean territorial emissions in relation to the
‘dirty’ South onto which core consumption emissions are displaced. Peripheries pollute
their environments, including through subcontracted industrial processes, while capturing
relatively little of the value of the commodity chain – indeed, this has been a major
inducement for off-shoring in the first place (Jorgenson and Rice, 2005). Rising emis-
sions in the periphery and semi-periphery are not commensurate with rising consumption
in those areas, since emissions produced within national territories often occur in order to
produce commodities which are consumed in the core. The top 10% and a fortiori the top
1% of consumers contribute much more to CO2 emissions than the remaining 90% or
99%. China, for example, despite its much-heralded rise as an offshore platform for mul-
tinational corporations, is a net exporter of value to the core even while it carries out its
own EUE with Cambodia through deforestation for timber and Brazil for soy (Cope,
2019; Frame, 2019). Metals and rare earths are similar: while needed for all kinds of
clean-tech, currently production is concentrated in Western China, placing the Yellow
River Basin in great peril, because rare-earth mines in the United States were closed amid
rising ecological loads (Kalantzakos, 2018; Klinger, 2018).
10 Politics 00(0)
Agriculture is also central, reflected in its increasing prominence in Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change reports (IPCC, 2018, 2019). Around 25% of world greenhouse
gas emissions come from agriculture, cattle rearing, and deforestation (IPCC, 2019).
Agriculture, historically a mechanism for storing atmospheric CO2 in soils and vegetative
material, has become a major source of US and global emissions. De-agrarianisation has
replaced labour with capital inputs, and such capital inputs are CO2-based. As Vandermeer
et al. phrased it,
We have moved from an ‘ecosystem function’ of energy generation to one based on fossil fuels,
thus converting an agricultural system whose main purpose was to provide energy to human
beings, to a system that is a net consumer of energy. (Vandermeer et al., 2009: 33)
In effect the industrial food system, far from improving on efficiency, is draining and
degrading ecologies.
CO2 emissions from agriculture have likewise increased in the periphery, where eco-
logical crises are interlinked in nearly unbreakable chains with social crises splaying
across city and countryside alike. During the 20th century, we can posit an ideal-typical
de-developmental and ecologically entropic sequence. Throughout most of the periphery,
albeit at a pace slower than in the core, and after a period of sustained anticolonial and
postcolonial struggle to wrest land and infrastructure from the colonial powers (Ajl, 2019;
Tilley, 2021), ‘modernization’ came to agricultural systems. This transformation was
enacted above all through the Green Revolution, intended explicitly to deter ‘red’ revolu-
tions in non-Communist Asia and further afield.7
The ‘development project’ replaced labour-intensive and capital-input-light poly-
cultures with labour-light and capital-input-heavy monocultures (McMichael and Weber,
2020). Polycultures yielded to monocultures where the latter had not yet been established
through colonial plantation systems. Biological simplification brought technological
remediation. Until about 1973, these processes greatly damaged the ecology, while often
slowly increasing national food-grain production per capita. At that point, the secular
tendency inverted. Amid the neoliberal counter-revolution against the rise of the South, in
many places export monocrops replaced food-grain production. Land grew ever-more-
concentrated (De Janvry, 1981; Patnaik, 2003) and, as technology replaced labour, sur-
plus labour reserves increased. This ecologically degrading and emissions-generating
de-agrarianisation process has therefore also rendered rural communities as surplus
‘overpopulation’, where many had once been subject to colonial coercion to reproduce
themselves as labour and fix their chronic ‘underpopulation’ status.
Both during the period of ‘national’ and neoliberal agricultures, ‘global de-peasantiza-
tion’ was the order of the day (Araghi, 1995), echoing northern developmental models
based on a false ‘universalism’. Universal development models were, in turn, based on
the denial of the colonial-racist impact of northern developmental paths, retroactively
alchemised into ideal-types (Jha et al., 2020). During the immediate post-independence
national-development period, projects attempted to create sufficient jobs, usually through
import-substitution industrialisation, to employ jobless migrants from the countryside,
and provide the necessary social infrastructure for them in the cities. Counter-revolutions
from the core and pressures to shift back towards the so-called ‘comparative advantage’
of primary resource exports brought ‘jobless growth’ and an increased ‘urban residuum’
of surplus populations. Swelling labour reserves compressed wages in the periphery and
Tilley and Ajl 11
semi-periphery, lubricating the displacement of polluting manufacturing sectors away
from the core.
Although colonisers were well aware of the genocidal and impoverishing effects of
their projects in the immediate term, colonial capitalist developmental paths to the present
used energy which seemed cheap to them, only because the broader long-term cost in
human lives and developmental outcomes could not, at least initially, be properly assessed
(Georgescu-Roegen, 1971). In consequence, those racialised and formerly colonised
countries, classes, and communities least responsible for climate change, and which have
least degraded or used the primary-productive capacity of the globe, will suffer or are
already suffering the most from it. Because of the long-term legacy of underdevelopment,
they also have the fewest resources with which to invest in protections from the harms of
climate change.
At a slew of post-2000 climate negotiations, the countries of the formerly colonised
world demanded reparations for climate debt. They argue that developed countries owe
the underdeveloped countries reparations, remediation, and supporting resilience and
restructuring. Such rhetoric was even influential within leftist environmental movements
in the core (Martinez-Alier, 2012) and there have been attempts to weld together the
frames of ecological debt, environmental justice, and EUE (Roberts and Parks, 2009).
However, these have been recently sidelined in the United States as the corporate-ori-
ented Green New Deal (GND) of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the social democratic
GND of Bernie Sanders overwhelm earlier discourses rooted in the demands of La Via
Campesina, the island states confronting inundation, the G-77, and paladins of a South-
centred climate movement like that responsible for the Cochabamba People’s Agreement
of 2010 (Ajl, 2021a). Such elements are the components of a meaningful anti-imperialist
eco-socialism, to whose parameters we now turn.
To where? Possibilities for anti-imperialist eco-socialism
and the end of population
As we’ve seen, liberal analysts like Dasgupta deploy population as a focus for environ-
mental action, but such a focus on falsely concrete aggregates distracts attention from the
social relations which produce environmental breakdown. In particular, colonial/imperi-
alist capitalism has been and continues to be central to such breakdowns, to the dehuman-
ising reduction of communities as under/overpopulated, and to the development of
technologies of measurement and intervention which cast women’s bodies as tools of the
state in population control. EUE illuminates how this socio-ecological disarray is rooted
in the uneven development of capitalism as a historical system. Furthermore, EUE also
suggests that social reproduction concerns – encompassing the ecology, the physical sub-
strate and necessary gendered social conditions for reproduction – are part-and-parcel of
accumulation on a world-scale, a position long articulated by anti-colonial feminists and
political ecologists (Federici, 2004; Mass, 1976; Salleh, 2017; Vergès, 2020).
We now consider how EUE informs possibilities for rupture from colonial capitalist
exploitation and ecological degradation, as well as possibilities for an anti-imperialist
eco-socialism. In simple terms, ecological repair is sought in part through equal exchange
on a world scale, which would bring an end to core over-consumption fuelled by cheap
resources from the South. This returns us to some of the primary concerns of Third
Worldist projects which have many times been attempted but almost always crushed by
imperialist interventions. Ceasing EUE requires action within a peripheral spatial-social
12 Politics 00(0)
unit and thus implicitly raises a national question: de facto and de jure national liberation
in the expansive Cabralian sense of sovereign and popular control of the productive forces
(Cabral, 1979). Plausibly, this would involve eco-socialist delinking, which would
involve collective decisions around which production processes to undertake based on an
ecological and popular law of value (Ajl, 2021b).
Returning to the suggestions of the Cocoyoc Declaration (1974: 5), such a system
would rest on ‘increased national self-reliance’ excising ‘exploitative trade patterns
depriving countries of their natural resources for their own development’. On the environ-
mental front, that means retooling technology so that ‘low waste and clean technologies
should replace the environmentally disruptive ones’ alongside a ‘more rational use of the
available labour-force to implement programmes aimed at the conservation of natural
resources, enhancement of environment . . . as well as the strengthening of domestic
industrial capacity to turn out commodities satisfying basic needs’ (Cocoyoc Declaration,
1974: 8). In short, these were proposals for an alternative, more self-reliant and socially
interdependent economic system, with attending to basic needs and safeguarding the
environment understood as tasks which could go hand-in-trowel. Delinking in this way
does not mean autarky but putting the basis for interaction with the international system
under national-popular control. To that end, remedial measures could include confront-
ing, rather than accepting, given market prices as the basis for trade through producer
cartels, shifting to barter exchange of use-values, demanding equal exchange, or rejecting
the production of certain cheap commodities (Yaffe, 2009: 173).
Centring national liberation also requires reckoning with its contradictions and pitfalls
(Fanon, 1985 [1961]) and a reminder that anticolonial nationalist projects also gestured
towards wider horizons of South-South cooperation and community beyond the bounded
and exclusionary confines of the nation-state (see, for example, Getachew, 2019; Salem,
2020). This also requires engagement with the Fourth World question, taking seriously
those Indigenous communities and ecologies sacrificed in the service of national devel-
opmentalist projects to which they do not ascribe, as in the case of the West Papuans (see
Hernawan, 2016). The national question also leads us to conflicting sovereignties between
majorities, Indigenous groups and internal racialised Others, as well as to the contradic-
tions between gendered rights and interests – not least reproductive justice claims – under
patriarchal states (see, for example, Wilson, 2018; Wilson et al., 2018).
This brings us to the social agents which might compel projects to bring an end to
EUE. Extensive work on environmental distribution conflicts tells us that environmental
justice movements, especially Indigenous and peasant movements, in the global periph-
ery and the core are consistently leading struggles for land rights, rights to water, rights to
clean air and the protection of sustainable ecologies (Estes, 2019; Parasram and Tilley,
2018). By rejecting the operation of the law of value within spatially circumscribed areas,
these are the social subjects of an actually existing anti-imperialist eco-socialism.
Agroecology and food sovereignty also describe such a struggle. In the periphery, food
sovereignty stems and stanches value outflows, because such value outflows are asym-
metric exchanges of tropical agricultural goods, not growable under any conditions in the
core (Ajl, 2018, 2019). For other goods, for example, food grains on which peripheral
countries are so often reliant, cereal imports also lead to value outflows (Friedmann,
1990). Smallholder ecological producers, as organised in confederations like La Via
Campesina, mobilise against forms of exploitation and expropriation which operate
through capitalist agriculture and industrial agribusiness: whether usurious credit, land
concentration, input-dependence, or cheap monocrop export-orientation. Rather, in their
Tilley and Ajl 13
place, La Via Campesina (2018: 27) make the case that ‘Peasant Agroecology is the first
and most important step towards achieving Climate Justice’. This also means redistribu-
tive land reforms, which have been central to every historical anticolonial delinking expe-
rience. Because EUE proceeds through sites of extraction, communities in El Salvador,
for example, have mobilised against that extraction by shutting down gold mining. EUE
could then be alleviated, but it can also be stopped through a national political dynamic
which asserts control over its productive processes and through South-South collabora-
tion to end the undervaluation of resources for extraction to the North.
We have limited most of our discussion here to the periphery and the semi-periphery,
but this is not because eco-socialism lacks social agents in the core. In the first place,
long-running social reproduction concerns make many people in the core a natural con-
stituency for eco-socialism, provided this is not premised on re-exporting socio-ecological
contradictions to the periphery via resource aggrandisement, land grabs, and other forms
of market-based or state-based acquisition of the periphery’s physical means of produc-
tion. This connects to our earlier discussion concerning Malthusian populationism and
white supremacy as organising conceits to justify unequal appropriation of productivity.
Production of cheap biofuels and cheap palm oil for export is in a zero-sum game with
food crop production or the need for inputs for a sustainable manufacturing/industrial
convergence with the core (La Via Campesina, 2010). Thus, eco-socialism in the core
requires a firm commitment to respecting peripheral national sovereignty and Indigenous
sovereignty, the reverse-coin of the peripheral aspiration to national liberation. In a word:
anti-imperialism.
Conclusion
When Fanon (1985 [1961]: 81) said Europe is ‘literally the creation of the Third World’
he alluded to the colonial processes of extraction of stolen or grossly undervalued
material and labour value from South to North. Here we extend this further by engaging
with the theory of EUE to show how this structural basis of the world economy has also
enabled ecologically disastrous cheap consumption in the Global North and driven the
North’s enclosure of the atmospheric commons. Without the constant flow of cheap
energy, biophysical matter, and the product of embodied racialised labour since the colo-
nial era, the concentrated excess of planet-choking activities in the North would simply
not be possible.
EUE has also been dependent on colonial and postcolonial efforts to manage, repro-
duce, move and restrict racialised ‘population’ according to the need for labour in the
mines, plantations, and factories of the South. The population management concerns of
colonial ideologues, especially in relation to maintaining the racial balance of power
across the colour line, survived into the present and are adapted and reinvigorated in
growing white nationalist and eco-fascist movements. Yet there has never been a firewall
between far-right and liberal discourse and, as Environmental Studies emerged in the
mid-20th century, white nationalists like Garett Hardin laundered their priorities with
ease into the mainstream. Their efforts to fuse population with environment have left us
with an impoverished field in which establishment liberals like Dasgupta can seriously
suggest interventions in the social orders of racialised women with the lightest ecological
footprint to restrict reproduction as a viable and useful course of action.
Here, we call for the forthright rejection of populationism, whether from eco-fascist,
liberal, or indeed socialist circles. The broad histories and contemporary instances of
14 Politics 00(0)
coercive and dangerous forms of sterilisation show us that such discourses lead to vio-
lence against poor women of colour, in particular. We call instead for an honest reckoning
with unequal exchange as the actual system of extraction, through which both environ-
mental harm and reproductive injustice are enacted. To reiterate, ecological (and social)
repair is only meaningfully possible through an anti-imperialist project working towards
equal exchange on a world scale, ending the flow of undervalued resources from the
South, and the excess of contaminating activities these enable. Meaningful anti-imperial-
ism stretches to, and indeed centres, the social and corporeal sovereignty of racialised and
Indigenous women and their communities across the Global South and North. This means
fiercely rejecting interventions in the social structures and bodily autonomy of women of
colour in the name of the environment. To reinforce this, we conclude by reasserting that
an anti-imperialist eco-socialism needs to be attuned to the teachings of reproductive
justice movements and resistant to creeping liberal eugenicism, as much as to the overt
eco-fascism which has proved so deadly in recent years.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Nivi Manchanda for her comments on an earlier draft, the Goldsmiths PERC com-
munity who commented on a presented version of this paper, and two anonymous referees whose comments
helped us to sharpen up the text.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
ORCID iD
Lisa Tilley https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8805-2398
Notes
1. We use core, First World, and Global North, interchangeably on one hand, and periphery, Third World, and
Global South, on the other hand.
2. Quotes from the unpublished manifesto of the Christchurch killer.
3. To be clear, Malthusian populationism concerns the perceived excessive reproduction of the poor, which
threatens access to resources by the rich. Eugenics is concerned with managing heredity to ‘improve’
racial ‘stock’ by encouraging reproduction among those with ‘desirable’ traits. Economistic population-
ism is concerned with the differential management of target populations to foster economic growth at the
national scale (see Murphy, 2017; Wilson, 2017, 2018). Although these originated as distinct projects,
which in many ways were in opposition to each other, we would argue that they are often combined and
blurred together in contemporary populationism.
4. It is important to note here that political interventions to centre population alarmism within the envi-
ronmentalism literature are much broader and more varied than Hardin. Paul Ehrlich’s The Population
Bomb and The Club of Rome’s report on The Limits to Growth are among other influential populationist
interventions with variously distinct and overlapping lineages of influence on contemporary environ-
mentalism. The work of Betsy Hartmann comprehensively situates such interventions and lineages (e.g.
Hartmann, 1995).
5. A broader analysis would account for eugenicist influences on the priorities and structures of liberal eco-
nomics (e.g. Singerman, 2016), which make the field amenable to importing eugenic populationism from
environmental studies, but such a discussion is beyond the scope of this particular article.
6. On the need to trace continuities between different periods of capitalism, see Patnaik and Patnaik (2016:
195–196).
7. China and other centrally planned economies are excepted from this sequence (Amin, 1983; Eisenman,
2018; Sharma, 2017).
Tilley and Ajl 15
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Author biographies
Lisa Tilley is a lecturer in Development Studies at SOAS, University of London. Her research focusses on politi-
cal economy/ecology, race, colonialism, extraction, and expropriation, with a particular focus on Indonesia. Her
published work appears in journals including Review of International Political Economy, New Political
Economy, Sociology, and History of the Present.
Max Ajl is a postdoctoral fellow at the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen University and an associated
researcher at the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment. His articles have been pub-
lished in Journal of Peasant Studies, Review of African Political Economy, and Globalizations. He is an associate
editor at Agrarian South and Journal of Labor and Society. His book, A People’s Green New Deal, was published
in 2021 with Pluto Press.
