Extinction or Socialism: Theorizing a Just Necropolitics in the Anthropocene

• In Event: Untangling the Mess: The Promise and Peril of Eco-Progressive Politics

Abstract

Climate change is not only real, but it is also affecting populations today, and no major political institutions in the world are doing enough to mitigate the worst aspects of climate change. The IPCC oracle claims that as a world, we should expect to see over a billion climate refugees, massive increases in species extinction, increasing devastating natural disasters, and, overall, a severe amount of death and suffering. While many consider highlighting these realities as being an alarmist or a doomer, as political theorists, we need to explore how political theory can help us make sense of and live politically in a world full of death and disaster. This paper assumes that all environmental politics moving forward (if not theoretically always) is a form of Necropolitics and that unless there is a radical shift in our political, social, and economic worlds that current systems of inequality--capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and coloniality--will dictate the Necropolitics of the future. This paper attempts to theorize a radical, democratic, and egalitarian Necropolitics. Central to this is the question: How can we ensure that those populations who are at increased risk of death in the future are not the same populations targeted for violence throughout the history of industrial capitalism? How can we ensure a more egalitarian and just politics of death? How can we do so without turning to, and embracing, either neo-Malthusianism or eco-fascism?  This paper looks at Membe's Necropolitics, Truscello's  Infrastructural brutalism, Kohso's  Radiation and Revolution, Groves Savage Ecology, Tyner's Dead Labor, and the discussions around pessimistic marxism in journals like Salvage.

Author

• Sean Parson, Northern Arizona University