Appears in Capitalism Nature Socialism 34:3
The new millennium has seen the maturation of a distinctly harsh brand of neoliberal transnational capitalism (Robinson 2018, 15). Facilitated by the decades-long expansion of the neoliberal agenda for global free trade (market liberalization), an end to most governmental regulatory practices that protect both people and the planet (deregulation), the takeover of former public services and state agencies by capital (privatization), and reductions in state spending on social and environmental protection pro-grams (fiscal austerity), the result is an unmitigated ecological disaster.
Some forty years and more of neoliberal capitalist development has resulted in nothing short of a worldwide environmental catastrophe, including a global climate crisis that threatens the very future of humanity and other species (Jamail 2019). It has also produced obscene levels of economic inequality and a vast “wealth defense industry” for the world’s ruling classes (Collins 2021), while vast sectors of the poor suffer major social dislocations (Faber and Schlegel 2017). These impacts have led to a wide range of popular struggles, strikes, mass protests, riots, and political mobilizations aimed at challenging the neoliberal agenda and unjust capitalist development models (Almeida and Martin 2022; Kalb and Mollona 2018). Some of the most dynamic actions are found in the increased use of grassroots organizing, civil-disobedience, land occupations and seizures, electoral strategies, ecotage, marches, rallies, and even direct confrontations by environmental justice (EJ), ecological, and climate change/justice movements all over the world (Dietz and Garrelts 2014; Huber 2022).
The contemporary reinvigoration of more authoritarian neoliberal regimes of capitalist development is a response to the growing fury of these struggles. As stated by Ian Bruff (2014, 113), “… we are witnessing the rise of authoritarian neoliberalism, which is rooted in the reconfiguring of the state into a less democratic entity through constitutional and legal changes that seek to insulate it from social and political conflict.” The function of authoritarian neoliberal capitalism is therefore “to reinforce and rely upon practices that seek to marginalize, discipline and control dissenting social groups and oppositional politics rather than strive for their explicit consent or co-optation” (Bruff and Tansel 2019, 234). In other words, as the legacy of harms associated with neoliberal capitalist development continues to build, and with the further implementation of even more impactful hyper-marketization strategies in the future, the use of authoritarian politics in many parts of the world is surely set to intensify.
This is not to say that authoritarian neoliberal capitalism is monolithic. Quite the contrary. It comes in a variety of forms. One of the most alarming is seen in the resurgence of far-Right reactionary or neo-fascist demagogic leaders. In recent years, Right-wing figures such as Vladimir Putin (Russia), Narendra Modi (India), Recep Tayip Erdogan (Turkey), Benjamin Neta-nyahu (Israel), Viktor Orban (Hungary), Giorgia Meloni (Italy), Rodrigo Roa Duterte (Philippines), and Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil) have become house-hold names for the repressive tactics unleashed on sectors of their own and neighboring populations (including immigrants). The list goes on, and includes former U.S. President Donald Trump (Faber et al. 2017).
The point here is to not excuse the abuses committed by the ruling classes of the world’s so-called liberal democracies. Some of the more insidious assaults on the rights of workers, people of color, poorer women, immigrants, the LBGTQ community, and citizens as a whole are actually being led by Parties and politicians traditionally considered to be more liberal, Center-Right, and even (at times) social-democratic. One need to look no further than the repressive and overtly racist policies implemented in the U.S. by the Democratic Party in the “war on drugs” and the “war on crime,” the cruel treatment of immigrant populations seeking refuge in the country, the rollback of civil liberties associated with the “war on terror,” and the criminalization of political protests (Nichols 2020; Selfa 2012). Then there is the imposition of cruel, neocolonial development policies, and the countless visible and invisible wars waged against popular forces by both Democratic and Republican administrations, especially in the global South (Soloman 2023). In this respect, liberal “democracies” can also be seen as adopting repressive forms of governance as well, especially when the economic interests of the ruling classes are at stake.
Regardless of the form, the ecological threat posed by authoritarian neoliberal capitalism is likely to grow. Given the hyper-competition for resources and market share in today’s global economy, the incessant expansion of the private property rights of capital are becoming increasingly antagonistic to the rights of the public (i.e. civil, human, and citizen-based) to a healthy and clean environment. These tensions will only escalate as the ecological crisis deepens. And, as they are largely unresolvable within a neoliberal framework, capital will become less interested in, and less capable of, neutralizing resistance and dissent via major concessions and forms of com-promise with ecologically-based movements. Instead, to maintain their hegemony, capital is likely to favor the explicit political exclusion and marginalization of specific subordinate social groups (workers, students, environmentalists, racial/ethnic minorities) and their movements through the “constitutionally and legally engineered self-disempowerment of nominally democratic institutions, governments, and parliaments” (Bruff 2014, 116). In these circumstances, an “appealing fantasy” of capital seeking to win in the global marketplace – particularly those corporations that are intensely exploitive of the environment – is one where punitive tactics are routinely exercised against the domestic political forces that “put this victory in danger” (Bloom 2021, vii).
In the United States, there is a currently a contestation for state power between the increasingly reactionary, Right-wing populists of the Republican Party on the one hand, and, on the other hand, an unwieldy configuration of progressive neoliberals, liberals, and Left-populists found in the Democratic Party (Fraser 2022). The progressive neoliberals, as seen in the Biden administration, are hegemonic within the Democratic Party. Progressive neoliberalism within the Democratic Party represents an accommodation of sorts of mainstream currents of organized labor and new social movements (climate change activism, environmentalism, feminism, anti-racism, multiculturalism, worker rights, and LGBTQ rights), on the one hand, and important sectors of finance and industrial capital (such as high tech) on the other. In such an alliance, neoliberal economic policy instruments (such as the North American Free Trade Agreement) are used to support corporate policy goals (free trade and market liberalization). Conversely, “watered-down” neoliberal social and environmental policy instruments (such as carbon pricing and emissions trading) are utilized to pursue progressive policy goals (stop climate change). Most recently, as embodied in Justice40 and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), among others, the Biden Administration has formed new alliances with progressives and the environmental justice (EJ) and climate justice (CJ) movements to help implement key components of its climate change agenda. Again, we see an interesting mixture of traditionally liberal and neoliberal policy approaches to advance progressive movement goals of decarbonization, increased climate resiliency, environmental equity and justice, and so forth.
These are the most far-reaching climate change and environmental justice policies ever advanced by the federal government, and show much promise of redistributing hundreds of billions of dollars to low-income communities of color in the pursuit of climate justice. But they are not enough. Deeper transformations are required. Here, I agree with the claim that the Left must challenge head-on the liberal and progressive neoliberal versions of feminism, anti-racism, environmental and climate justice, and LGBTQ rights if we are able to form a truly counter-hegemonic, multi-racial, multi-class, trans-environmental movement for ecological socialism (Faber 1998 Faber, Levy, and Schlegel 2021; Fraser 2021). More on that shortly.
Given the dire state of the global ecological crisis in general, and the climate crisis in particular, ever greater levels of popular mobilization and political demands for a more transformative and justice-oriented environmental politics seem inevitable. From the perspective of the oil and gas industry, previous strategies of climate denialism are no longer sufficient to the task of movement “containment.” Evidence that the climate crisis is upon us is now too overwhelming, particularly given the disastrous climate-related events of 2023. Instead, capital is engaging in renewed and expanded efforts to de-democratize the state in their favor, and to disenfranchize those sectors of the population leading the charge for environmental and climate-related causes (Cray et al. 2021).
In this House Organ, I will focus on the threat of authoritarian neoliberal capitalism in the United States. Here we see the ascendency of a reactionary (and sometimes neo-fascist) politics, richly financed and even organized by major corporate polluters, that embraces a type of ethno-capitalist vision that seeks to “Make America Great Again.” People of color and the poor, immigrants, the LBGTQ community, intellectuals, environmentalists, liberals, and socialists are demonized as the sources of social and economic dissatisfaction, and must be politically marginalized if the exploitation of the planet is to proceed.
The goal of this House Organ is not to glorify Liberal democratic capital-ism and America’s electoral system just because they are under attack. The point is to rather demonstrate how the political disenfranchisement of people of color and the working class is central to capital’s efforts to control the state and economy. Below, I will outline the contours of this attack in the U.S., with the aim of exposing the strategies and tactics employed by the most environmentally destructive fractions of capital to undermine liberal democratic institutions and the climate change movement, and institute a more authoritarian neoliberal capitalism (Faber and Vestergaard 2022).[1] In future House Organs we hope to outline the anti-ecological contours of authoritarian neoliberal capitalism as it is expressed in other countries and regions of the world.
The Assault On America’s Liberal Democracy
America’s liberal democracy is under assault. The past six years have witnessed the greatest rollback of voting rights since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The enactment of targeted voter ID restrictions, making voter registration more difficult, the use of gerrymandering to manipulate the allocation of congressional seats, the disenfranchisement of incarcerated individuals, the replacement of non-partisan election officials with extremist Right-wing ideologues, and the wrongful purging of voters from the rolls are all examples of various strategies being successfully employed in this offensive. These practices are meant to disproportionately impact people of color and young voters. These populations are also overwhelmingly pro-environment, and pro-climate action voters.
The impacts of this assault on voting rights are chilling. Between 2016 and 2018 alone, over 17 million people were purged from voting rolls across the nation.[2] In 2021, more than 440 bills across 49 states were introduced that were designed to hijack the election process and suppress the right to vote, namely for people of color and young persons. Some 18 states actually passed 34 laws restricting access to voting. As stated by the Brennan Center for Justice, “These numbers are extraordinary: state legislatures enacted far more restrictive voting laws” than at any other time this century.[3]
Such attacks continue to escalate. Right-wing lawmakers in 39 states considered at least 393 restrictive bills during the 2022 legislative session, and another 150 restrictive voting bills in 32 states in 2023. These lawmakers are pushing what can only be described as a tidal wave of restrictive voting initiatives and anti-democratic state laws. Some include new rules limiting the number, location, and/or availability of mail ballot drop boxes in Democratic districts. Others dramatically reduce the hours and number of polling places in low-income communities of color. The nastiness of these efforts is symbolized by Georgia’s new state law (S.B 202) criminalizing the passing out of water to people waiting in long lines to vote – a situation created by the state’s intentional reductions in the number of polling stations located in communities of color. Georgia counties with large Black populations were systematically reduced to having only one polling place, and consequently had some of the longest lines in the country in the last federal election.
How are such attacks possible, and what are the social forces currently laying siege to voting rights in America? The answer reveals that capital is playing a starring role in the effort to subvert the voting rights of their pol-itical opponents, especially people of color. This point is rarely raised in public discourse by the corporate-owned mainstream media. Instead, the focus is on the actions of “extremist” Trump-supporting Republicans, including the more explicitly racist, misogynistic, and reactionary Make America Great Again (MAGA) wing of the Party. But closer examination reveals the role of Right-wing corporate power structures and conservative
billionaires in providing the money, institutional support, and the political playbook for enacting a roll back of voting rights and a weakening of America’s democratic institutions. The Republican Party would not be leading this charge if their corporate backers disapproved of such methods. Instead, the current assault on American democracy is being co-organized and bank-rolled by the most environmentally destructive corporations in America. Termed the polluter-industrial complex (PIC), these are the sectors of Big Business that would stand to profit the most from the neoliberal agenda to weaken environmental regulations, public health and safety measures, and prohibit climate change legislation (Faber 2008). They are among the most powerful corporations in the world, and the oil and gas industry stand at the top of the list.
The reason for this assault is simple – the fossil fuel industry and the PIC are engaging in a series of maneuvers designed to recapture control of the state. At the heart of this strategy is an effort to suppress the voting rights of Indigenous peoples, young people, and those living in Black, Brown, and other low-income communities. These are the very people on the frontlines of the environmental and climate crises. For instance, Latinos (69 percent) and Blacks (57 percent) are more likely to be alarmed or concerned about climate change than are Whites (49 percent) (Pearson et al. 2018; Ballew et al. 2020). About eight-in-ten U.S. Latino/a people surveyed say addressing global climate change is either a top concern or one of several important concerns to them personally (Mora and Lopez, 2021).
As a result, people of color are more likely to vote for pro-environment candidates. And candidates of color elected to represent communities of color have the strongest pro-environment and climate change records in Congress. The League of Conservation Voters released an environmental scorecard in 2017, and revealed that Representatives of color are leading the way. The Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus (CAPAC) received a near-perfect score of 98 percent. Next came the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) with 90 percent and the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) trailing close behind at 89 percent (Funes, 2017). Indigenous voters were also critical voters for climate action in the 2020 elections. Although they faced various barriers to voting, the large turnout of Indigenous peoples is the reason Arizona turned from red (Republican) to blue (Democratic) in the 2020 election, and helped Biden to win the national election.
Efforts by capital to roll back voting rights for people of color are further fueled by the recent struggles of the environmental justice (EJ) and climate justice (CJ) movements to halt the building of new pipelines, refineries, industrial facilities and other fossil fuel infrastructure in states all across the country. The political-economic interests of major corporate polluters are served by the political disempowerment of these movements and their supporters, including elected officials (Malm 2021). The greenhouse gangsters that make up the PIC are attempting to silence popular mobilizations for climate and social justice – as well as increasingly successful efforts to regulate the fossil fuel industry’s climate impacts – by disempowering historically oppressed communities of color, progressive youth and students, and White working-class families who care about the climate crisis.
OIL-Igarchy vs. Democracy
Nicos Poulantzas (1973, 297–298) once described the organizational alliance of different fractions of capital engaged in attempts to dominate the state and society as a power bloc. In the case of the polluter-industrial complex (PIC), this power bloc is dominated internally by a hegemonic class fraction of landed capital – especially the fossil fuel industry – that attempts to subordinate the economic interests of the other class fractions to its own economic interests. In this respect, the fossil fuel industry works to situate itself politically as representative of the general common interest of the power bloc and capital as a whole. In short, the polluter-industrial complex acts to reproduce the privileged place of its corporate members within the larger relations of economic exploitation and political domina-tion. As such, the PIC power bloc exists both outside and inside state apparatuses, and constitutes an organizationally networked power structure. The power bloc is an instrument of capital’s mobilization for the purpose of securing political power (Poulantzas 1978, 234).
The polluter-industrial complex is a highly reactionary power bloc made up of those sectors of American business and transnational capital that would stand to profit the most from a weakening of the liberal and progressive neoliberal regimes of environmental regulation. These sectors include petro-chemical companies and agribusiness firms seeking to relax rules governing the use of pesticides; timber and mining interests looking to open up protected areas to resource exploitation; tobacco companies seeking to weaken public health standards; Big Pharma working to reduce regulations on chemical pollution; and railroads, auto manufacturers and big utilities seeking exemptions for clean air regulations. The oil, coal, and gas industries are the most significant players. They are the industries devoting the most resources into the environmental and climate change counter-movements.
Finance Capital
Fractions of finance capital also constitute a critically important component of the PIC. For instance, U.S insurance companies are the second-largest type of institutional investor (after pension funds) based on assets under management. And the majority of these companies are heavily invested in
the fossil fuel industry. In fact, the forty largest U.S. insurance groups owned$459 billion in investments (bonds, common stock, and preferred stock) in oil and gas, coal, and utilities in 2014 (McHale and Spivey 2016, 5). This amount is roughly equal to the Gross Domestic Product of Norway. The level of financial and organizational integration (interlocking directorships, stock ownership, and so forth) between fossil fuel capital and financial capital is so extensive that essentially each industry equates the profits of one as being essential to the other. This is one of the many reasons why a corporate executive like former Liberty Mutual Insurance Director Joseph Hooley is now the Lead Independent Director on the Board of ExxonMobil.
The biggest U.S. insurance company, State Farm, did not even consider the risks of climate change in its investment portfolio in 2018, when it held over $22.4 billion in fossil fuel investments. In 2015, State Farm held some 37 million shares of ExxonMobil stock, and more than 16 million shares of Chevron stock. This might help to explain why State Farm has been the biggest insurance industry backer of state lawmakers sponsoring voter suppression bills targeting low-income communities of color – communities that are more likely to elect political candidates that support strong environmental legislation (Tanglis, Lincoln, and Claypool 2021).
Similarly, banks and other financial institutions play an indispensable role in the PIC power bloc. The top 60 global banks provided $673 billion to fossil fuel companies in 2022 alone. In fact, from 2016 – the year of the UN Paris Agreement on Climate Change – to 2022, these same banks provided $5.5 trillion in financing to the oil and gas industry. The top four financiers during this time were all U.S. banks: JP Morgan Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America. They provided $1.366 trillion in financing alone (Seidman 2023).
The Organizational Structure of the Polluter-Industrial Complex
These corporations together comprise the most ecologically destructive sectors of American business. There are at least 128 organizations that make up the core of the PIC. They have come together to create a sophisticated infrastructure of interlocking organizations, including: (1) trade associations such as American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM); (2) corporate lobbying groups and climate opposition coalitions (such as the Cooler Heads Coalition); (3) fake citizen-based (or astroturf) but actual corporate front groups; (4) public relations firms; (5) corporate and family-based foundations; and (6) anti-environmental think tanks, research centers, and policy institutes. The policy institutes are either: (a) large multi-issue organizations (such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation) broadly committed to advancing conservative causes, including an anti-environmental and anti-climate change agenda; or (b) organizations (such as the Heartland Institute) more specifically focused on attacking climate change policy and environmental protection per se (Brulle 2023; Brulle et al. 2021).
The PIC functions to rollback and/or prevent environmental regulations, EJ programs, public health and safety measures, and climate change legislation (Faber 2008). They also spread targeted voter disinformation, draft repressive voting suppression strategies, and work to weaken labor unions. The PIC is especially committed to merchandizing “climate denialism” vis-à-vis corporate propaganda campaigns designed to sow the seeds of doubt among the general public, media, and policy makers, claiming that climate change is not real, and/or that it poses no threat to the country or the world (Fessman 2019; Oreskes and Conway 2012). To further achieve these objectives, the PIC is also funneling huge sums of campaign contributions to state and federal officials in the Republican Party [along with select Democrats, such as Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia] that are leading the legislative charge against voting rights and/or meaningful climate change legislation.
Funding the Polluter-Industrial Complex
The majority of the identifiable funding for the PIC policy infrastructure comes from large corporate polluters, corporate and conservative family foundations, and dark money sources such as Donors Trust and the Donors Capital Fund (DCF). These are Donor Advised Funds (DAFs) that conceal the identity of contributors. From 2003 to 2018, $9.77 billion in donations was channeled to these 128 PIC-related organizations (such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute) working against climate change legis-lation. These donations now average around $800 million a year. Some 74 percent of all these contributions came from completely unidentified sources (Brulle et al. 2021,2–7). This “well-oiled” machinery is the catalyst for one of the most expensive corporate propaganda campaigns in history: climate change denialism.
Out of this $9.77 billion total in support, $2.65 billion came from 3,787 private foundations in the form of grants. Many of the largest and most powerful of these foundations were started and/or strongly supported by the oil and gas industry and other corporate polluters, and play a highly influential role in the conservative movement. Just 10 percent of these grant makers, which include the Charles Koch Institute and Foundation and ExxonMobil Foundation, accounted for 94 percent of all of these grants. Two dark money groups alone – Donors Trust and Donor Capital Fund (DCF) – accounted for 13.7 percent of the grants.
The Koch family and the Koch Family Foundation are prominent contributors to Donor Advised Funds that pass on funding to numerous voter suppression groups. Koch Industries is one of the world’s largest privately-owned fossil fuel energy services corporations. The financial empire created by Charles and the late David Koch, the libertarian fossil fuel billionaire brothers who own a chain of refineries, pipelines, and fossil fuel subsidiary companies, is most influential. For four decades the family has served as the key funders of the conservative movement in the United States. Koch-related foundations have poured over $145 million directly into 90 plus groups attacking climate science and policy over the past 20 years and more.[4] Similarly, ExxonMobil provided nearly $33.8 million in funding to think tanks and policy institutes working on climate denialism and/or other conservative causes from 1997–2015.[5] And now voter suppression efforts.
As revealed by the Center for Media and Democracy, the Koch-supported Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund are bankrolling tens of millions of dollars to the leading policy groups that are designing voter suppression strategies and laws that are being adopted by states all over the country. This includes the Public Interest Legal Foundation, True the Vote, Judicial Watch, and especially the Judicial Education Project (Kotch 2021). Koch even once financed a multi-state campaign that sent out faulty voter registration information to targeted communities in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Virginia, and West Virginia (Riesternberg 2014).
Koch Industries and related sectors of capital are now bankrolling the creation of a more authoritarian neoliberal capitalist state. In essence, the polluter-industrial complex is seeking to manufacture an OIL-igarchy in place of liberal democracy and progressive neoliberalism. The attack on voting rights is becoming the most essential component of this strategy.
Uncovering the Role of Capital in Subverting America’s Electoral System
Today’s manipulations of America’s electoral system are reemerging in service of the same masters – and some new ones as well. In North Carolina, for instance, the racial gerrymandering of the redistricting plan adopted by the Republican Party concentrated Black voters into a small number of districts and diluted their electoral weight. The creation of what the Rev. William Barber has called apartheid voting districts allowed the Republicans to capture nine of the state’s thirteen congressional seats in the 2012 elections, even though Democratic candidates received the majority of votes statewide (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018, 209–210).
And under the guise of “stopping voter fraud,” restrictive voter identification (ID) measures are being instituted in red states across the country. The push for voter ID laws is based on a false claim perpetuated by Trump, the PIC, and the alt-Right wing of the Republican Party, that voter fraud is widespread in the United States. However, all reputable studies have concluded that levels of such fraud in this country are virtually non-existent. The most comprehensive investigation of voter impersonation found only 31 different incidents of voter fraud in general, primary, special, and municipal elections from 2000 through 2014 (in the general and primary elections alone in the U.S., more than 1 billion ballots were cast during this time). In fact, the Brennan Center has found instances of voter fraud to be so exceedingly rare that it is more likely that an American “will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls” (Levitt 2007).
Voter ID Requirements: The New Poll Tax
Republicans are nevertheless pushing for restrictive Voter ID measures to combat this nonexistent problem. The late John Lewis, a longtime civil rights leader, once referred to these Voter ID laws as a “modern day poll tax.” In Georgia, one of the first states to adopt the new measures, Blacks are five times more likely than Whites to lack a government issued ID (such as a driver’s license). In fact, some 37 percent of Black people and 27 percent of the Latino/a population nationwide do not possess a valid driver’s license, compared to just 16 percent of Whites (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018, 184).
Elevating Partisan Electoral Officials
Perhaps the most dangerous threat to America’s liberal democracy aligns with the capture of the country’s state electoral administrations by the alt-Right. As stated by Donald Trump, “elections are decided not by those who cast the votes, but by those who count them.” In this respect, the Republican Party is working to methodically replace non-partisan election officials with ultra-conservative political operatives. Those changes include more than a dozen Republican-controlled states passing new provisions to interfere with the impartial administration of elections, and to take over key election positions, like secretary of state offices and local election boards in major battleground states. Numerous pieces of legislation have given discretionary powers to these Republican officials (including legislators and judges) to outright reject “suspicious” election results from specific (typically Democratic) districts. In the upcoming elections, thousands of votes, or even millions, could be invalidated to produce the desired outcome (Berman 2022).
Republican legislators in eight states, sometimes overriding the vetoes of Democratic governors, have already claimed partisan control of crucial electoral responsibilities or shifted them away from elected secretaries of state. In Georgia, Republicans have “changed the composition of local election boards – which not only certify elections but determine things like the number of polling places and ballot drop boxes, as well as voting hours – by ousting Democratic members and replacing them with members of their own party … In Lincoln County, for instance, the recently reconfigured election board proposed closing six of the county’s seven polling sites” (Berman 2022).
Climate Denialism
It is worth pausing here to make note of the “capture” of the Republican Party by the Koch industrial empire and the PIC. It is nothing short of astonishing. The Grand Old Party (GOP) is now deeply beholden to large corporate polluters, particularly fossil fuel capital. Fourteen years ago, many Republicans were in favor of measures to address climate change and protect the public from its deleterious effects (Davenport and Lipton 2017). Then the imperiled fossil fuel industry—led primarily by Charles and David Koch —threw its tentacles into the pockets of GOP members standing in opposition to climate change legislation, and stances flipped across the party (Goodkind 2020). In the 116th Congress (2019–2021), some 150 Republican climate denialists accepted $68 million in donations from the fossil fuel industry, compared to $23.6 million in 2006 (Brown 2021).
Today, if a Republican dare speak on the need to address climate change, even within a progressive neoliberal policy framework, the polluter-indus-trial complex (PIC) in general, and the Koch apparatus in particular, will shift their financial and political support behind another climate change denying candidate in the election primary. The threat of being “primaried” by the Kochs and the PIC led to the wholesale shift in the political positions of Republicans (and the Republican Party) around climate change. For Republican officeholders, it is now political suicide to publicly accept the science of climate change, let alone try to take action on the issue. Politicians who show support for climate legislation know that their campaign funding will dry up and that they will face PIC-backed challengers in the primary elections (Davenport and Lipton 2017).
But as the climate crisis intensifies, climate denialism is proving to be increasingly ineffective political rhetoric. Popular demands for climate action are increasing. In this respect, the PIC is developing new and more extremist tactics designed to dissuade the state from taking action to end the U.S. economy’s dependence on fossil fuels. In fact, we see more aggressive tactics to elect PIC-friendly candidates to political office at both the state and federal level that are opposed to climate change legislation. In 2020, for instance, the oil and gas industry spent an estimated $138.8 million in federal elections (these figures do not account for dark money groups, whose spending is secret) (Lau 2021). In turn, the correlations between the anti-environmental/climate change stance of elected officials and the campaign contributions they receive from the oil and gas industry are striking (Gold-berg et al. 2020). In 2018, 88 percent ($41.3 million) of industry’s campaign donations were to the Republican Party (Holden 2020).
Disenfranchizing People of Color and Young Voters
It is becoming apparent that the polluter-industrial complex would be quite comfortable with an authoritarian neoliberal state that would disenfranchize millions of pro-environment voters of color, as well as students, workers, and the disabled. Leaked records of their internal deliberations reveal that PIC-funded policy organizations have coordinated efforts to draft and support state laws that make it harder to vote, especially for those citizens living in poorer communities of color (Mayer 2021). Leaders in this effort to impose new voting restrictions include the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., where the voter suppression advocate Hans Von Spakovsky has managed their Election Law Reform Initiative. Paul Weyrich, a co-founder of Heritage, once stated, “I don’t want everybody to vote … our leverage in the election quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down” (Kroll 2020). Other key organizations include the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which produces model laws and policies for state governments, and the Federalist Society, a legal organization working to fill the courts with conservative anti-environmental judges. The Honest Elections Project, which is tied to Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, a close friend of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (himself a former lawyer for Monsanto), has filed briefs at the Supreme Court, and in numerous states, opposing mail-in ballots and other reforms that have made it easier for working people and people of color to vote (Mayer 2021).
These organizations are largely the creations of the oil and gas industry, and are consequently being handsomely rewarded for their efforts. Between 1997–2015, ExxonMobil alone provided over $9.2 million to the Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, ALEC, as well as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI)(Readfearn 2016). ALEC is also a key recipient of oil and gas money from Marathon Petroleum, Koch Industries, and Peabody Energy, among others. More than a year before the 2020 election, ALEC created a secret “working group” on election issues that would address redistricting, ballot measures, and election law, working to create model legislation to further voter suppression efforts (Corey 2020).
The foot soldiers of the voter suppression movement are state lawmakers willing to do the bidding of the PIC. From 2015 to 2020, corporations contributed over $50 million to state legislators supporting voter suppression bills that especially targeted Blacks and other communities of color (Tanglis, Lincoln, and Claypool 2021). Trade Groups gave another $36 million. Eleven companies alone from the PIC provided some $2.8 million of these funds, including Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Dominion Energy, and Marathon Petroleum.
Over $1.12 million was provided by railroads and the transportation related industries to state lawmakers supporting voter suppression bills. This should come as no surprise. For nearly three decades, the four largest rail companies – the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BSNF) Railway, Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern, and CSX – have spent tens of millions of dollars on climate denialism. In fact, the railroad industry is at the center of the climate change countermovement, having long been a central player in the corporate coalitions created by the PIC to undermine climate change regulations. No sector of American capital has a greater overlapping membership in these corporate anti-climate change coalitions, including the oil industry. They have given $31 million to just seven climate denial organizations (such as America’s Power) since 2012. The reason is that the larger railroads make about 14 percent of their profits from the transportation of fossil fuels (some $10.7 billion in 2018). Nearly 70 percent of American coal is shipped by rail (Faber and Vestergaard 2022,37–38).
Funding Right-Wing Politicians Who Attack Voter Rights
Corporate capital and the PIC are especially adept at channeling huge sums of money to the campaign chests of federal politicians leading the attack on voting rights and our democratic institutions. In the days following the Trump orchestrated January 6th 2021 insurrection and assault of the U.S. Capitol, six of the biggest fossil fuel companies in America – Valero Energy, Marathon Petroleum, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Occidental Petroleum, and ConocoPhillips – gave nearly $700,000 to the campaign and leadership PACs of the 147 Republican members of Congress who voted against certifying the election of Joe Biden as President. Koch Industries corporate PAC provided $775,000. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has termed these politicians the Sedition Caucus (Li 2022). In total, some 1,074 corporations and industry group PACS gave over $27.5 million to the Sedition Caucus members and allied committees.
According to the Center for Media and Democracy, Koch Industries was the biggest corporate donor ($14 million) to super PACs and other outside groups that spent money to help initially elect many of the 147 House and Senate Republicans who voted to overturn the elections and disenfranchize
millions of voters. Charles Koch’s Americans for Prosperity advocacy group and its affiliated super PAC spent close to $18 million on ads to elect some of the members who attempted to decertify the election (Kotch 2021). The nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics found that lawmakers objecting to the Electoral College results received $9.3 million from the oil and gas industry (Evers-Hillstrom 2021). Koch Industries PAC is the fourth largest donor to coup-supporting politicians (behind only the Majority Committee PAC, the American Bankers Association, and the National Association of Realtors).
Besides driving voter suppression initiatives and creating climate-related injustices, the fossil fuel industry is increasingly providing direct funding to the police forces and institutions of repression in communities of color across the country. As stated by Gin Armstrong of the Public Accountability Initiative:
The oil and gas companies, private utilities, and financial institutions that bankroll fossil fuels are all big backers of police foundations, which privately raise money to buy weapons, equipment, and surveillance technology … ..These corporate actors – from Chevron and Shell to Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase – can be found serving as director and funders of police foundations nationwide. These [same] companies, which rely on extraction and exploitation to secure their profits, have an incentive to form tight bonds with police forces, which function to uphold and protect their interests in the face of community opposition (Armstrong, 2020).
The semi-privatization of funding for police forces in service of the fossil fuel industry represents another dimension of authoritarian neoliberal capitalism. The PIC is also pushing legislation that criminalizes public protests around fossil fuel infrastructure and facilities, and is openly weaponizing the police and the criminal justice system (Cray et al. 2021). This is an example of how the attack on voting rights, environmental racism, and climate injustice are all linked to corporate power and authoritarian neoliberal capitalism.
The Limits of Liberal Democracy in the Struggle for Social and Environment Justice
Only through profound social mobilization and heroic struggles over the preceding centuries have women, Black and Brown citizens, Indigenous peoples, Asian-Americans, students and young people, ethnic minorities, and the working poor secured their right to vote and participate in the American electoral process. Even then, power structures rooted in class domination, settler colonialism, and White supremacy countered with poll taxes, literacy tests (designed to exclude poorer voters who had undeveloped reading and writing skills), registration labyrinths, and the flat-out
intimidation and coercion of Blacks and other people of color in the South and elsewhere following the Civil War and Reconstruction. These instru-ments of voter suppression and intimidation continued into the 1960s, and were finally addressed with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In turn, achieving the right to vote has led to some noticeable reforms over the years that have improved the lives of oppressed peoples of color and the American working class. These reforms are now under assault by the U.S. Supreme Court and other state institutions.
Again, the purpose of this House Organ is not to glorify Liberal democratic capitalism and America’s electoral system just because they are under attack. Instead, I have sought to demonstrate how the political disen-franchisement of people of color and the working class is central to capital’s efforts to control the state and economy. In the end, of course, the United States is not a genuine democracy. America’s liberal democracy, whether under the control of Republicans or the mainstream of the Democratic Party, is still dominated by corporate power structures in service of the country’s ruling classes. In fact, an exhaustive Princeton University study of 1,779 policy battles over a 30-year period found that the United States operates more as an Oligarchy than a Democracy. They discovered that the policy preferences of working and middle-class Americans have virtually no discern-able, independent effect on policymaking whatsoever (Gilens and Page 2014). And while electoral reforms can serve as a precondition of sorts for new forms of grassroots mobilization and piece-meal reforms, they are alone grossly insufficient for achieving a genuine democratic state and economy.
Instead, the task of the Left is to replace the neoliberal state with a more bottom-up democratic political economy. In so doing, the Left must resist what Antonio Gramsci called trasformismo, or the adoption of preemptive liberal and/or neoliberal reforms that merely serve to reinforce prevailing social relations and distributions of political economic power. For Gramsci, trasformismo is a process of co-optation that serves to assimilate and domesticate more radical (or even counter-hegemonic) political demands, and thereby obstruct the formation of organized opposition to established systems of power (Newell 2019). The genius of progressive neo-liberalism is in the passing of preemptive reforms that bestow legitimation on the Party. But there is an alternative. Through the adoption of proactive radical reforms, the Left can create counter-hegemonic building blocks for even more emancipatory (even revolutionary) reforms down the road once asufficient base of popular power has been achieved (Fraser 2021; Gorz 1967). What Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007) calls “non-reformist reforms” can serve as building blocks for the socialist movement.
Today, we are witnessing inspired struggles for racial and environmental justice gain new momentum. Fights to halt the building of new pipelines,
refineries, industrial facilities and other fossil fuel infrastructure are escalat-ing in states all across the country. The EJ movement also now occupies important seats of power within the Federal bureaucracy, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Energy. And as seen in the struggles against the Keystone and Dakota Access pipe-lines, this growing movement for climate and environmental justice is making new connections between corporate power, poverty, racism, the vio-lation of Indigenous rights and sovereignty, climate change, and the ecologi-cal problems found in America’s inner-city neighborhoods, barrios, Native lands, Chicano farming districts, and poor rural communities of color. Press-ing for greater economic justice and political power, such as the right to know about hazards facing the community, the movement is mobilizing Indigenous people, communities of color, and some important segments of the White working class, to fight climate change, industrial pollution, toxic dumping, uranium mining, and other environmental dangers (Faber 1998; Gilio-Whitaker 2019; Sze 2020). This includes more radical proposals for a Red and Green New Deal (Akbar 2020; Albert 2023).
Time is getting short. The Left must now work to build a mass-based, multi-racial, multi-class, intergenerational, and trans-environmental move-ment for climate justice and eco-socialism. In so doing, eco-socialists and eco-feminists must come together with each other and other social move-ments to advance truly proactive reforms that offer both a radical critique of the abuses of neoliberal capitalism and an inspirational vision of a better future offered by a truly democratic ecological socialism. Such an emancipatory agenda would create pathways for building ever-growing systems of democratic popular power that challenge the hegemony of capital (Akbar 2020). The social and ecological contradictions inherent to authoritarian neoliberal capitalism are serving to create the conditions for the emergence of such a more radical, transformative politics (Bruff, 125). We are dedicated to exploring these political possibilities offered by this his-torical moment in the coming issues of CNS.
Acknowledgement
The author would like to thank Leigh Brownhill, Salvatore Engel Di-Mauro, Maarten de Kadt, George Martin, Christina Schlegel, Judith Watson and Federico Berghmans for their editorial comments, suggestions, and criticisms of this article. I am grateful for their valuable input and advice. All faults are solely those of the author.
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