White Skin Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism, is a 2021 book by Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective. It is a cautionary tale about the rise of what they call fossil fascism. Throughout this stimulating and historically grounded book, they bring to light the connections between climate denialism and the rise of white nationalism, and lay out a theory of how the fossil fuel industry could be the driving force in a new wave of fascism worldwide. They do this by looking at the past, digging up the historical roots of an alliance between fossil fuels and right-wing political movements and parties, and warning that fascism is on the rise once again throughout the world.
But first, what is fascism? Malm and the Zetkin Collective describe it as a violent “historical force” that can arise after a crisis. But any old crisis isn’t enough — it must be a crisis that shakes the foundations of society, causing the masses to feel “the ground disappearing beneath their feet.” Even then, the capitalists will only call on fascists when they feel that the crisis can’t be solved by the “normal procedures of bourgeois democracy [such as]: peaceful party competition, regular elections… rule of law, at least some basic freedom of expression and other democratic rights.” And additionally, they will only call on fascists when they fear that another force — such as an organized working class — may use the crisis to foment revolution, or at least challenge the dominance of the ruling class.
What fascism then entails is “an exceptional regime of systematic violence against those identified as enemies of the nation.” In this way, fascism is a type of ultranationalism, in which the nation must be fought for at any cost, and against any perceived threat, by any means necessary. The authors relate this phenomenon to the present day, by taking us through a history of the forces that uphold the white nationalism so clearly visible today.
They also uncover the forces intensifying the existential crisis of climate change that could bring about a new kind of fascism, which includes a combination of white supremacy and intense nationalism. Here we encounter the fossil fuel industry, or what they call fossil capital. Fossil capital has created an atmosphere of climate denial, where blatant lies have for decades brought us closer to environmental catastrophe.
They lay out the case clearly: “As early as 1957, scientists working for… Humble Oil [which was later to become Exxon and then ExxonMobil] published peer-reviewed calculations of the atmospheric impacts of CO2 from fossil fuels.” Just two decades later, in 1978, a senior scientist of the company warned top managers about a “general scientific agreement” that burning fossil fuels had a negative impact on the climate. He further told them there was a “‘time window of five to ten years’ before humanity must make the critical decisions.” The company responded not by changing its practices, but by instead placing itself at the forefront of climate research. Their climate models were so advanced that they accurately predicted, in 1982, what the atmospheric content of CO2 would be in 2019! But Exxon was not the only company in the know; Shell, BP, GM, Mobil, and more, all attended symposiums and conferences on what was then called the “greenhouse effect.”
With the fossil fuel industry well aware of its impact on the climate, yet still needing to profit from the destructive fuel, it had to distance itself from the science. So, the companies launched campaigns that denied climate change, attempting to turn it into “a non-issue.” They “attacked climate scientists for being prone to myth,” while at the same time recognizing in internal documents that “the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied.”
As more research came out, some companies did publicly acknowledge the science, choosing to greenwash their image while not actually reducing their production. Others took the opportunity to shift the focus onto new schemes such as “carbon capture” or “voluntary offsetting” which, at best, could mitigate carbon emissions and allow companies to move responsibility for emissions from one place to another to avoid cutting those emissions. These are practices which would not require them to cut their emissions and extraction, and most importantly, would not cut into their profits.
But even as scientific consensus on climate change became so clear that much of the public could not ignore it, some continued to push for denial. Most of this denial is perpetrated by the right wing. However, many liberal academics and liberal capitalists practice what the authors call “neo-optimism,” admitting that there is a problem, yet downplaying its severity and questioning the need for urgent, revolutionary action. For example, in 2018 liberal figureheads like Bill Gates “gifted” 4 million copies of the book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World – and Why Things are Better Than You Think, to students with the message that we shouldn’t “overreact” to climate change.
In terms of the denial organized by fossil capitalists, the authors argue that this has been taken over by the far right and connected to anti-Muslim and anti-immigration sentiment. They observe that “every time a European far-right party denies or downplays climate change, it makes a statement about immigration.” In explaining the historical context of this connection, they point out that “the first crisis of world capitalism to be centered on fossil fuel was also the first to be attributed to Muslims.” This was the oil crisis of the 1970s. To uphold structures of white supremacy in Western nations, the far right turns any discussion of climate change into an attack on whiteness itself. To do this, the right uses a series of contradictory arguments, all of which protect the fossil economy while instilling a fear of non-whiteness. For instance, the far right claims that the grim climate projections are alarmist propaganda and instead claim that our real concern should be confronting an apocalyptic picture of “Islamization,” which they believe is the real threat to white humanity. At the same time, the right parties also claim that the climate change we do see is actually caused by overpopulation of Muslims and other non-white ethnic groups (although in fact, 92% of the world’s excess emissions come from the Global North). Hence the climate change that intensifies the global refugee crisis actually feeds into right-wing paranoia of being overrun by non-white Muslims. Yet they rarely admit that global warming is one of the leading causes of that refugee crisis in the first place. While these views may seem contradictory and confused, the authors argue that they are used to simultaneously point a finger at Muslim countries and justify the continued use of fossil fuels by white, western nations. These false accusations dehumanize those who are already bearing the brunt of the climate crisis and deflect attention from fossil fuels as the root cause of climate change. They further justify the continued use of fossil energy sources that can be quantified and owned within the borders of a nation, and downplay the need for renewable energy sources like wind and the sun, which cannot be demarcated or contained within national boundaries.
Just as immigration and Islamophobia are tied to the far right’s response to the climate crisis, Malm and the Zetkin Collective also lay out how racism and the extreme attachment to the personal automobile support and almost require the continued use of fossil fuels. First, the eighteenth-century invention of the steam engine and coal-powered technology allowed Europeans in the nineteenth century to colonize large parts of Africa and the Americas quickly and forcefully. Colonizers themselves have explained the importance of coal in maintaining power over other groups of people, claiming that their superior minds allowed them to take advantage of those resources and that it was their destiny to extract it for themselves. Later, abundant oil in the 1920s Americas allowed the development of the automobile, which became a status symbol…until the shortage of rubber and gasoline during World War II created a situation where Americans could no longer use their private automobiles. This created tension: white and Black Americans were packed into trolleys and buses to get to work on the war effort, with Black people often employed as the bus drivers and trolley operators. This heightened racial tensions to new levels. When the war ended, whites in the U.S. with enough money – and privileged access to government subsidized loans for suburban housing – rushed to gas stations and used their private cars as a way to distance themselves from the urban centers, which were by the 1950s perceived as Black places. Massive government funding of highway systems and access to cheap gas fed a new segregation, with white people fleeing to suburbia and leaving Black people in poor, deteriorating urban areas with a declining job base. The amount of investment in cars and gasoline, as well as subsequent lack of funding in more sustainable modes of public transportation, has locked in the government and ruling class commitment to fossil fuels and privatized (as opposed to public) transportation. All these factors helped create the white, suburban middle class that is the basis of modern U.S. conservatism, which has morphed in recent decades into the social basis for a reactionary, potentially fascist movement.
In their discussion of fascism and fossil fuels, the authors further demonstrate how classical fascism glorified the use of oil, steel, the machine, and the deadly weapons that came with modern capitalist industry. Machines, for them, were the highest example of man’s ability to control, dominate, and ultimately destroy nature for the good of “the nation.” They viewed oil- and coal-powered weaponry as a way to “build our white ramparts again” and protect themselves from the “foreign races” who stir restlessly outside the nation’s borders. Today, many white suburban and rural people in the U.S. view their automobiles and technology as the symbol of U.S. strength and superiority, and a defense against potential enemies.
Although those sections of the book describe horrific phenomena and processes, perhaps the most depressing portion discusses the role of the working class in this scenario. In the Italian and German variants of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, few to no workers supported the fascist movements. Instead, fascism was made up largely of the fearful middle classes – the petty bourgeoisie – who identified with the capitalist bourgeoisie but were in reality desperately trying to keep from sliding backwards in the cutthroat world of capitalist competition. The vast majority of workers solidly supported labor unions, and many were members of socialist and communist parties, even if those parties had lost their revolutionary direction. The authors recognize that today there is not even a well-organized workers’ movement, much less a revolutionary left, in almost any nation on earth. Because there is no strong, well-organized workers’ movement or revolutionary party for the working class to look to for ideas, energy, organization and leadership, millions of workers are therefore “politically homeless.”
In this state, they are more susceptible to the emotional pull of the rage against the system that is displayed by the irrational, reactionary right, shaped of course by the money and propaganda of the big capitalist class. When workers are unable to effectively analyze and recognize the root cause of most of their problems – the capitalist system itself – it is difficult for them to find any ways to identify and challenge the forces tossing them about. They are then more susceptible to misinformation from politicians and big money interests that can lead them to blame manufactured enemies like Muslims, immigrants, or environmentalists for their problems.
As the authors write, “there is no way around the fact that closest to the far right are those who identify as white and male.” Those white males, many middle class, but now possibly including at least significant numbers of the working class, cannot accept the reality of their economic backslide, and have neither a working-class movement capable of stopping that backslide nor a revolutionary party capable of helping them understand the root cause of their problems and a way forward. Therefore, they slide deeper into the fantastical assertions of the fascist right. After some point, facts and rational argument are no longer effective with people who have come to deeply believe these myths, so they dig in their heels even more firmly against a rethinking of their beliefs, in a desperate attempt to deny reality.
After connecting the dots among the many subjects that expose the current conditions we are living under, by the end of the book the authors have shown how big oil and coal have dominated our global political economy and lied for decades about the environmental and human destruction they have wrought on our world. They lay out how the reactionary right has completely supported the use of fossil fuels while diverting people’s attention to other supposed enemies or crises, like Muslims or immigrants or poor Black communities. They show how the automobile and suburban development nourished racism and the idea of freedom as inseparable from the private automobile. And they demonstrate how all of these developments are feeding the twenty-first century variants of fascism that threaten us all over the world. They cite dozens of examples of far-right parties in this mold, and demonstrate that the Trump movement has been based firmly in a larger, international right-wing playbook.
Today, Malm and the Zetkin Collective argue, the only segment of the capitalist class likely to openly support a violent fascist movement are the oil and coal industry and other major capitalists who profit from it. That’s a huge segment of large and powerful capitalists. The oil industry is intimately tied to the automobile industry, the suburban road-building and development industry, the airline industry, the plastics industry, not to mention militaries around the world. In other words, a huge segment of the global capitalist economy still rests on the continued production and burning of oil and coal.
Malm and the Zetkin Collective argue that as we start to phase out oil production and use (or even try more seriously to limit it), the industry and its many allies within the capitalist system will desperately fight back for survival. That might mean turning to the irrational, difficult-to control, and violent fascists who already exist in order to crush those of us who would put them out of business and try to build a more sustainable world. Think of planetary resources shrinking under climate collapse and massive refugee migrations, desperate attempts at climate crisis mitigation by the world’s governments, and explosions of fascist violence, supported and financed by fossil fuel capitalism, against those they view as their enemies. The authors argue that “as long as such capital exists, it will resist its own abolition. In this regard it bears comparison with “slaveholding capital” of the early 19th century United States. In other words, just like slaveholding capitalists of the southern United States were willing to initiate war to protect their investments in slaves and cotton plantations, and just as Italian and German capitalists were willing to hand power to murderous fascists to crush the labor and socialist-communist movements in 1920s Europe, so too might fossil capitalists today be willing to encourage and then turn to fascism to stop their own extinction.
While Malm and his co-authors brilliantly and clearly present us with this nightmare scenario, they offer no real solutions. They know that the crises are coming, and they give us a scenario for how they might develop. In their closing sentence, they urge us not to surrender by fleeing from this coming fight. But they do not try to show us the way forward, or try to give us the tools necessary to conduct the fights that will be necessary.
Our perspective goes beyond their analysis. We still believe that the working class has the potential to stop fossil fascism from coming to power and causing untold suffering. Workers still do all the work of society. We still create the wealth that the capitalists need in order to maintain their dominance. When workers unite along class lines, rather than along racial, gender, national, or religious lines, we can exercise a power far greater than the capitalists and their governments. In recent years poor people and workers worldwide have shown the will and the ability to rise up against injustice and oppression. In the protests that spread worldwide following the murder of George Floyd and other Black people in the U.S., the massive protests against a dictatorship in Belarus, the protests of Chileans that led to the rewriting of that nation’s constitution, the anti-SARS uprising in Nigeria, the Yellow Vest movement in France, or the recent Hands-Off marches and Tesla Takedown actions in the U.S., millions have shown themselves willing to organize and stand up for ourselves. While none of these have been purely working-class movements, nor have we been well-organized in these cases, these movements still demonstrate the potential that we have to struggle against our oppressors, and against the destroyers of our planet.
What’s more, the authors focus their analysis primarily on the populations of the U.S. and Europe, many of whom live a significantly more materially comfortable life than their counterparts throughout the world. This largely ignores the potential of workers and the millions of poor and dispossessed in South Asia, East Asia, Africa, and Latin America. They concretely have the least to lose, yet are already feeling the disruptive effects of climate change on their livelihood, their homes, and their food supply, and most don’t own a car or a nice suburban house. In other words, not only do the working classes of the highly developed capitalist nations have an interest in standing against fascism and ending climate change, so do hundreds of millions more throughout the world.
For us to exercise that type of power, we can’t fall for the seductive, irrational rage and scapegoating of the right. Through solidarity in the workplace and beyond, through the building of organizations, and by exposure to a truly revolutionary perspective, we can identify another road to take. We can recognize the need to put an end to the capitalist system altogether, eradicating both the billionaires and their corporations who have done so much to distort our understanding of reality, and the economic system that feeds the desperation of millions who have turned to the right for lack of a better political option.
While Malm and the Zetkin Collective help us understand the challenges we face, and the roots of these challenges, they do little to help us take them on. For that, we need a revolutionary organization, deeply rooted in the working class, with its finger on the pulse of the class. For those of us working to build this type of organization, let’s use this deep and provocative analysis of Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective to inform our work. But let’s go beyond their analysis and do the work to build the revolutionary working-class organizations needed to stop fossil fascism in its tracks.
