White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism

Fossil fuels are the universal substratum for the production of surplus-value - not a material for this or that specific product, as bauxite for aluminium or oranges for juice, but a type of energy utilised across the spectrum of commodity production. It is this special status of fossil fuels in the total metabolism of capital that comes into view in the climate crisis. Conversely, we could say that the problem of ozone depletion was relatively easily managed because there did not exist any primitive accumulation of chlorofluorocarbon capital with which the rest of capital lived in symbiosis, and hence no capitalist class fraction with the capacity to sabotage the Montreal Protocol enacted in 1989.

The layman's impression of a debate between researchers who believed in global warming and those who disputed it was completely manufactured by the class faction that knew, before almost anyone else, that there was no reason to have such a debate, any more than one over heliocentrism or the laws of thermodynamics. The debate was a vicious trick, the denial but a tactic. Some of the early reports might have been buried deep in desks and archives, but the knowledge was updated and the duplicity renewed on a regular basis. Exxon, for instance, spoke with a consistently forked tongue over the years, saying one thing in internal documents and something entirely different in advertorials and other PR material.

For anyone concerned with the possible reappearance of fascism, it follows that 'the key question becomes: what kind of crisis calls this politics to the agenda?'

But no crisis has ever induced fascism through automatic causation, just as no ingredients bakes themselves into a bread. Someone is always running the bakery. Paxton highlights the fact that both Mussolini and Hitler came into office by order of traditional power-holders. Both men were invited to rule by the legitimate representatives of their respective states - King Victor Emmanuel III in October 1922, President Von Hindenburg in January 1933 - who acted out a shared resolve among their dominant classes to bank on fascist forces as the best way out of the impasse. Both Il Duce and the Fuhrer had taken a previous stab at seizing power on their own - the former in the election campaign of 1919, the latter in the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 - and failed abysmally. Their route to government passed through an alliance with the existing establishment. [...]

Such analysis should not be mistaken for a facile view of fascism as the string doll of big capital, designed by it and moving as it did. Keen observers from Zetkin onwards recognised fascism as a mass movement in its own right, with an authentic following - even among some proletarian strata - and a winning nationalist zeal irreducible to the needs of any dominant class fraction. It was never the first choice of a king or president. Rather it served as a last resort, to which official powerbrokers and bourgeois layers turned in an hour of desperate need. [...]

The second condition of the existence of fascism was the willingness of sections of the dominant class to call upon the fascists to relieve the crisis. Fascism, then, was not for ordinary times.

Anderson laid it down: every postponement of the 'day of reckoning' has intensified the contradiction between capital accumulation and the life-support systems of the earth. Every additional gigatonne of carbon sent into the atmosphere makes half measures less viable. Every moment of stalling mitigation has ensured that if it ever commences, it will have to exercise the highest degree of control over the material conditions of life - first of all, over the privileged minority wasting the resources on which all others depend, notably the carbon sink of the atmosphere. [...]

The development of climate politics seems to obey a law of polarisation: the higher the temperatures, the more acute the antagonism between a left that alone stands ready to pick up the instruments for alleviating the crisis and a right that, for that very reason, refuses to contemplate it. A recursive cycle has been rolling for some time. Every year of inaction necessitates more revolutionary action the next; every threat of such action - if only of a hypothetical, tautological character - strengthens the conviction that this is a plot by the left.

The logic appears robust. In a world where black and brown lives matter little, and where global warming first destroys such lives, then it will not be a matter of great concern. But if there is indeed a real effect of this kind - it's a problem for non-white trash, so let's keep burning - we would expect it to be most powerful in the early stages of warming, up to, say, 2°C, whereas at very late stages, at 6°C and 8°C and beyond, it would presumably wane with the differentials in vulnerability. At 10°C, the blondest Swedes will be reduced to cinders too. In other words, the effect would be most politically efficacious precisely in the window of time when mitigation could make the largest difference. Everyone will be in the same furnace and see their shared destiny only when it's far too late to do anything about it.

But it could also be hypothesised that the articulation of energy and race that developed over the nineteenth century, in the most primary levels of modern capitalism, sedimented an association between whiteness and fossil fuels that wells up like magma in a time of climate breakdown. Certain defenders of such fuels might feel, on some level, questioned not only as burners but more specifically as white people, who for so long have had their tap-root of riches in the bowels of the planet. One can hear some of this association echoing in one of the boilerplates of white supremacy, in the US in particular: whites should be proud for having invented the modern world.

The motorist wants to be left alone, preferably have the road to himself as he speeds forth. 'We are now, truly,' Mitchell writes, continuing the SUV-owners anthem, 'the liberal, autonomous subject. We own ourselves and no one can intrude upon us without our permission.' The car, in other words, exudes the ideology most detrimental to any efforts to cut emissions - an ideology of form as much as content, abiding no rationing or accommodation of foreign others.

Among the messages in a bottle that Adorno sent out like an armada, this one is not the least disconcerting: the break with reality is caused by reality itself and then reacts back upon it. Under the conditions of a fossil economy, the rational thing to do is to turn on the coal stove, take the car to work, fly to Thailand for a holiday, buy some shares in an oil company. The totality is irrational. It cannot adjust to the reality it produces and so breaks off from it, one way or another, in a flight that inevitably sweeps up individuals too. 'People are inevitably as irrational as the world in which they live.' [...] We can particularise this diagnosis and say that after the onset of the climate crisis, the reproduction of fossil capital as such secretes ideologies of denial and other irrational pathologies.