Mushroom Dialectics: Green Capital, Nature, and the Politics of Eco-Militancy

One critical theme of Marshall Curry's documentary If A Tree Falls: A Story About the Earth Liberation Front (2011) is that advancing radical strategies for climate justice beyond the established model of pacifism will be rejected almost unanimously. In an interview with the director, journalist Robert Levin labels the film a "cautionary tale," implying that those who utilize guerrilla tactics to bring recognition to climate catastrophe will be summarily contained by the repressive state apparatus.¹ As ecotage became conflated with political Islam in the post-9/11 "war on terror," the national security apparatus, combined with the assistance of "big ag" industry, sought to infiltrate and destroy eco-militant groups, while mainstream environmentalism either fell silent supported the crackdown.² As this route has led to static reformism in terms of dealing with the crisis, we also see how market-driven "green" ideology has hijacked initiatives that might confront the Anthropocene. This "greening" effect has also intensified what Joel Kovel labels the "internalized fatalism" that holds that while we no longer can end the reign of capital, we can tweak it to work toward sustainability while averting extinction on a mass scale.³

With the preceding characterization in mind, my intention in this article is to rethink the parameters of eco-militancy through a historical lens while also providing a context for building radical ecological struggle that emphasizes system change over green capitalist trickery and reformist fatalism. Building upon the work of such figures as Andreas Malm, Carylon Merchant, and David Pellow, among others, I argue that the legacy of the ecological guerrilla has been obscured by what I term the green capitalist complex, which obfuscates the notion that militant activism can generate the development of an ecosystemic society. As such, what is missing in both orthodox critiques and leftist assessments of the history of radical environmentalism is that eco-militancy compels us to revise our conceptions of nature outside the exchange-value rationale of capital and the romanticized adaptations of biocentrism that underlie current forms of climate justice. I begin with a reassessment of radical environmentalism to understand the context of eco-militancy in settler-colonialist states of the Global North. This analysis will enable us to reconsider how movements like the Indian Maoists can be situated within the broader struggle against green capital as it extends its influence across hotspots in the Global South. I end with a consideration of how eco-militancy might be utilized in rebuilding an inclusive struggle for revolutionary change to challenge the hegemony of the green capitalist complex, and for shaping restorative ecological justice in the midst of capitalist-driven extinction.

Green Capital: A View from the Present

If industrial capitalism set the stage for transforming our relationship to nature in the modern period, the emergence of green capital has reconfigured ecological knowledge systems to adhere to the tenets of neoliberalism and its continual modality of counterrevolution. In the most basic sense of the term, green capital is the attempt to remedy environmental degradation by utilizing natural resources in a more efficient and "conscientious" way, while pushing for stronger regulatory measures to curb greenhouse emissions. From car manufacturers dedicating profits to reforestation, to big oil conglomerates funneling money into universities that are developing techno-fixes that might stave off ecological disaster, green capital has become the mainstay of contemporary cultural, political, and economic reproduction by postulating the notion that market accountability has been the missing feature of free market wisdom, and that with just a little tweaking, we can gently fuse profitability and sustainability. As such, green capitalist ideology has also permeated consumptive habits in the Global North while local markets across the Global South are compelled to facilitate these new practices, leading to deepening forms of uneven development and inequality that have reached previously unseen levels in the postpandemic era.

However, a closer examination reveals how green capital acts as an anthropocentric counterrevolution by reorganizing the levers of perpetual accumulation to gratify the needs of multinational interests, all with the blessing of mainstream environmentalist groups who consent to big capitalist intervention...