This talk, presented by collective member George Edwards, explores the anti-ecological dimensions of the far right, with a specific focus on the strategies and processes through which the far right mobilise in relation to the climate crisis. After introducing the collective and its previous work, this talk interrogates the contemporary politics around the ‘war on cars’. We start by focusing on a group of ‘Blade Runners’ who have been sabotaging the infrastructure of ultra-low emissions zones (ULEZ’s) in and around London, before documenting how the pandemic-era conspiracy machine, fuelled by far-right grifters, climate denialist think tanks, and amplified by their allies in mainstream conservative parties and media, has latched onto sustainable urbanist policies like 15-minute cities, low emissions zones and low traffic neighbourhoods, blending them into an apocalyptic vision of creeping ‘globalist’ authoritarianism. As the climate crisis deepens, so too does this conspiracist dystopia, which we refer to as the ‘inverted crisis’.
We track these developments in other European and American cases, to show how through tactics of ‘inversion’ diverse right-wing actors proliferate narratives, images and fantasies that at once mirror and obscure the material crisis of planetary warming; that align with the interests of fossil capital; and that serve as tools in the otherwise unimaginative arsenal of establishment right-wing parties. In these ‘inverted’ narratives, social reality is structured around binaries: truth and lies, nationalists and globalists, freedom fighters and totalitarians, the suburbs and the city, workaday motorists and climate protesters. Within the inverted crisis, we find individual automobility is fast becoming a cipher for a broader set of struggles: a symbol of individual liberty, the nuclear family, and the ‘energy-secure’ nation. But we also find the tropes and memes of inversion playing out in new arenas, from the farmers protests to political forums. We reflect on the implications of this rightward drift, where potential solutions to the crisis are increasingly framed as the crisis itself.
moderated by: Stipe Ćurković
The Zetkin Collective is an ecosocialist group of scholars and activists working primarily on the political ecologies of the far right. The collective’s first book, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism, co-authored with Andreas Malm, was published with Verso in 2021. This lecture is based on an essay of the same title, co-authored by William Callison, George Edwards, Jacob McLean and Tatjana Söding. Recently published in Salvage Journal, The Great Driving Right Show is presently being extended into a book. George is a PhD candidate at the University of Warwick, his research focuses on the energetic and ecological dimensions of nationalism in Britain from the post-war period to the present.
