NEPS5031

As late capitalist ecological, social, and political crises have intensified, eco-fascism hasfestered across the world, from India to New Zealand to the United States. Fusing theimperative of climate action with racism, xenophobia, anti-communism, and otherreactionary ideologies, eco-fascism’s façade of environmental consciousness makes aparticularly dangerous conduit for mounting right-wing reaction. New ecologically-oriented socialist movements have arisen to combat eco-fascism and fascism as a whole.Ecosocialism as an overarching paradigm not only builds upon the successes but alsoaddresses the shortcomings of the past five hundred years of resistance, rebellion, andrevolution against the colonia, capitalist, and imperialist world-system.This course invites students to explore the constantly evolving dialectic of eco-fascism andeco-socialism through critical political and economic perspectives that tackle the historicalcauses of today’s existential ecological crises. Braiding together Marxism, world-systemsanalysis, decoloniality, ecofeminism, and Indigenous socio-ecology, the course’sinterdisciplinary texts and multimedia materials will track how capitalism has 1) robbedand degraded land, labor, and life throughout the world since its inception, 2) relied onstate power to carry out this expropriation and denigration, 3) consolidated multi-sitedand multi-scalar national, racial, gendered, and sexual hierarchies to justify these processesand stifle opposition to them, and 4) fused key elements of all deleterious trends to defenditself through fascism and eco-fascism. Students will concomitantly assess a range ofecosocialist proposals for their capacity to address the root causes of eco-fascism, includingbut not limited to democratic economic planning, municipalism and communalism, post-growth and degrowth, and Indigenous and peasant food, land, water, and seed sovereignty.