For an Anti-Imperialist Ecological Modernity

In this paper we introduce the Journal of Labor and Society’s special issue on the ecomodernist features of imperialism and argue that these concepts must be theorized in tandem. The introduction begins by showing how ecomodernism and imperialism combine in practice through the example of the Council of Foreign Relations’ ‘Climate Realism Initiative’. It then charts ecomodernism’s emergence as a distinct theory and practice, arguing that it can take capitalist and anti-capitalist forms, both of which reproduce imperialist mechanisms of accumulation on a world scale. The paper’s third section questions the anti-modernist critique of ecomodernism offered by the concepts of extractivism and green colonialism. We then develop what we consider a more precise and rigorously anti-imperialist critique of imperialism’s ecomodernist aspects before concluding with some political propositions about the necessity of what we call a ‘communist ecological critique’ and by summarizing the special issue’s contributions.