Time to DeColonize EcoModernism!

Time to DeColonize EcoModernism!

Authored by Jackie Smith

Professor of Sociology, Pittsburgh University and former Editor, Journal of World-Systems Research

In this moment of global systemic crisis, the most important task for us is to “[grow] a livable planet” (p. 10) while repairing the damage caused by centuries of capitalist extractivism. With DeColonize EcoModernism! (2025) activist-scholar Ariel Salleh charts the path toward a social order supportive of this “human right to livelihood” (p. 16). Building on decades of political experience and movement-based learning, she presents a synthesis that will enrich inter-generational learning and guide the kind of transversal movement building that is so necessary today.

This book highlights inspiring practices and projects that can guide movement building towards an alternative, life-giving system. Salleh interrogates the dynamic processes and power structures that reinforce prevailing patterns of exploitation both in society at large and in social movements. In our ecomodernist era, sociological reflexivity, she argues, is essential to building transformative social movements for self-governance. It is a skill much in demand as representative democracies flounder and right-wing extremists find responsive audiences among disaffected and struggling people. Salleh invites readers to expand their sociological imaginations with insights that center the experiences of these Others – women, indigenous peoples, and youth – excluded from the dominant historical narrative. She exposes the life denying tendencies of “patriarchal-colonial-capitalist relations” that characterize the modern Androcene.

Androcene Others

Building movement-informed knowledge for dismantling global capitalism and replacing it with alternatives is especially difficult in this period of technology-driven, globalized, and militarized accumulation (Robinson 2014). Corporate-dominated mass media promote consumerist practices and narratives that intensify individualism, social segregation, and political polarization. Moreover, the techno-scientific utopianism of prevailing “Green” narratives dismisses the Others, whose traditional knowledge provides antidotes to the toxic effects of life under capitalism. Many on the Left unquestioningly embrace elements of ecomodernist thinking, ignoring the material costs of modern technologies. Such impacts are disproportionately born by Othered groups. Yet Salleh’s essays on nuclear energy, biotechnology, as well as the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, show how these communities on the front lines continue to resist threats from environmental hazards, as well as from surveillance and repression.

Sharing lessons from ecofeminist leaders across the globe DeColonize EcoModernism! provides a thoughtful, balanced criticism of social movement politics. We learn from the book that effective movements for change have centered the wisdom and advocacy of Othered labor classes – “meta-industrial workers” who support social reproduction through care for human and non-human communities. In both global North and South, they prioritize “the local” and reject the false “universal dualisms” that steer the Eurocentric Androcene – “Humanity over Nature, Masculine over Feminine, White over Black, Subject over Object.”

Global “Operating Systems”

Salleh’s insights into the systemic drivers of exclusion, extraction, and exploitation, enabling capitalist accumulation, resonate with our North American work in the “right to the city” movement; itself part of the global “movement of movements”. Local initiatives for the human right to livelihood in cities have expanded dramatically in the years since the global financial crisis of 2008 intensified housing insecurity in communities around the world (The Shift, 2022). My own involvement in this movement dates back to the early 2000s World Social Forum process, which provided an infrastructure for diverse, grassroots groups of capitalism’s Others to identify their commonalities while growing coalitions for a transformative politics.

This work is part of a long history of popular struggles to promote life and community against the system that values profit at the expense of life. Although diverse, there is also a profound unity in these movements, often brought by ecofeminist analysis and leadership. Elsewhere, I describe such alternatives as engaged in a project of “human rights globalization” that aims to re-program the global operating system’s institutions and practices (Smith and Goodhart 2024). The schema outlined in the table below reinforces the book’s conclusions about strategies that help realize the world we need.

Adapted from: Smith and Goodhart (2024: 127)

Matrix of Debt

Ecofeminists like Salleh focus on the patriarchal system of racialized capitalism as a threat to livelihood and dignity. They illuminate its intersectional patterns of exploitation and extraction and erode its binary conceptual foundations. The “dialectic of patriarchal-colonial-capitalist practices” that fuels competition and militarism and obstructs movement solidarity emerges very clearly in the chapters of DeColonize EcoModernism! The book identifies a “libidinal rift” running through the hierarchy of pre-capitalist and subsequent social orders, fueling multiple crises of the contemporary Androcene.

But the aim of this book is not just to gain clarity on what’s wrong in everyday life, but to nurture life-affirming emancipatory knowledge in social movement struggles. A key political theme here is the account of capitalism’s “global matrix of thermodynamic debt” to its Others. This includes “a social debt to inadequately paid workers; a livelihood debt to peasant smallholders; an embodied debt to women family caregivers; a generational debt to youth; an ecological debt carried within nature at large” (p. 87). Readers will not need reminding that failure to acknowledge and repay this debt promises escalating conflict, violence, and ecological disaster. And as the above right to the city schema suggests, such ideas matter. They help define shared values and priorities, motivate collective action, and shape everyday incentives that reproduce a given social order or make social transformation possible.

Joining the Dots

Salleh’s ecofeminist analysis brings attention to values and the role of intimate relationships in the operation of power. It sensitizes us to how Androcene thinking is reproduced in mainstream institutions. She shows how even the institutions that many see as progressive – like universities and the United Nations, are in many ways hard-wired to reinforce patriarchal-colonial-capitalist interests. Nevertheless, such institutions can be mobilized to advance change, as long as movements engage them with vigilance and clarity of purpose.

The Others whose “meta-industrial labor” belongs to “relations of reproduction” in the broadest sense of that word have been at the forefront of projects for subsidiarity, food sovereignty, and local democracy around the world. Their combined networks challenge the capitalist prioritization of profit over life, offering values and priorities that center human rights around decolonizing notions like buen vivir and ubuntu. In this creative world-making, today’s social movements forge paths that move us from where we are now to where we must go, not just to survive but to thrive. Salleh’s book DeColonize EcoModernism! will inform that journey. In particular, her attention to the promise of contemporary youth activism, and succinct compilation of political lessons from past struggles, is most welcome.

References

Salleh, A. (2024) DeColonize EcoModernism! London and New York: Bloomsbury.

Robinson, W. I. (2014). Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity. Cambridge University Press.

Smith, J., & Goodhart, M. (2024). Introduction: Human rights globalization: How local and global actions institutionalize human rights. Journal of Human Rights, 23(2), 125-133. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/14754835.2024.2324202

The Shift. (2022). The Shift Directives on Financialization and Human Rights. https://make-the-shift.org/directives/

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