Lambert here: And high time, too. Patient readers, I am baffled about what has happened at my right hand margin. Perhaps somebody more clever than I am with HTML can pinpoint the error.
“Interview with Ulrich Brand – ‘An eco-socialist strategy questions the power of capital’ ” [LSE Review of Books ((CC BY 4.0))].
Capitalism at the Limit: A Political Ecology of a World in Crisis by Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen explores the deepening socio-ecological crisis’s entanglement with the capitalist mode of production and consumption. In an interview with Zeynep Öztürk, Ulrich discusses that entanglement, its links to the rise of authoritarianism, and the possibility of alternative modes of living.
ZÖ [Zeynep Öztürk]: To begin, I would like to ask about the motivation behind your recent book. It was first published in 2024 and recently translated into English. Why did you feel the need to write this book, Capitalism at the Limit, at this particular moment?
UB [Ulrich Brand]: Before Capitalism at the Limit, together with Markus Wissen, I published The Imperial Mode of Living, which came out in German in 2017 and was later translated into many languages, including English, Turkish, Arabic, Spanish, and Portuguese. Around 2020, in the context of COVID-19 and the beginning of the war in Ukraine, we felt the need to write a book that would diagnose the present conjuncture, building on our earlier work on the imperial mode of living, which focused on its conceptual foundations and ecological modernisation, largely in the Global North.
So, we start the new book with a description of the climate crisis and how it is deepening. What we see now is that the project of ecological modernisation, which was very much at the core of the first book, is increasingly under pressure from right-wing, anti-ecological projects.
ZÖ: Since your new book builds on the concept of the “imperial mode of living”, could you briefly explain what you mean by it?
UB: The main argument is that all political and economic dynamics at the global, national, and regional levels are inscribed in everyday life. To reproduce our lives in the Global North and increasingly also in the Global South, people rely – via the market and commodities like cell phones, clothes, industrialised food, or cars – on cheap labour and cheap nature “elsewhere”. And elsewhere can mean the Global South, but it can also mean places closer to home.
But the argument is more complex than that. The imperial mode of living also operates through discourses that justify why it is acceptable that people possess and use, for instance, a cell phone or why they “need” to have a car. These discourses tend to obscure the living and working conditions behind production, as well as the way nature is accessed and often destroyed, for example when lithium, copper, or fossil fuels are extracted.
It is a very Gramscian question: the question of hegemony. Hegemony means that there must be a material form of consent. People participate in and reproduce the imperial mode of living rooted in a specific mode of production and patterns of consumption, both of which depend on exploitative labour relations and ecological destruction.
ZÖ: How do you see your approach contributing to existing Gramscian understandings of hegemony?
UB: We argue that a Gramscian approach needs to take into account the biophysical basis. Gramsci already has an understanding of materiality in the sense of structures. Historical materialism (the Marxist theory that holds that ideas and social institutions develop only as the superstructure of a material economic base) offers a very strong understanding of the historical development of power-shaped and domination-shaped structures, which today shape the conditions of action. And these structures have to do with exploitation of humans and nature. Our contribution with the book, and with the concept of the imperial mode of living, is to really link political ecology to Gramscian thinking.
Additionally, there is a current of Gramscian thinking which is very cultural, which interprets hegemony mainly in terms of ideas, discourse, and contestations within civil society understood as a separate sphere, and in a way moves away from Gramsci as a Marxist. And this is why we insist that the imperial mode of living is not just a form of consciousness; it is rather a material and lived practice.
ZÖ: In the book you suggest that social crises can no longer be adequately managed within capitalism. Could you elaborate on that?
UB: We do not argue that capitalism will collapse in five, ten, or fifteen years. Historically, imperial capitalism had relatively easy access to global and often cheap resources. We call this externalisation, one of the mechanisms through which the imperial mode of living is reproduced. A limit is the ecological and particularly the climate crisis itself. For many years in the Global North, people assumed that the climate crisis mainly affected the Global South. But now it increasingly interferes with everyday life, the economy, and society in the Global North.
In the past, capitalism has repeatedly managed to overcome crises. Think of the crisis of liberal capitalism after 1929, or the crisis of Fordism in the 1970s, when neoliberalism emerged. The neoliberal project ultimately prevailed and re-stabilised capitalism with a new international division of labour and the rise of countries like China. We argue that since around 2010 this formation has also entered a deep crisis. We do not see the emergence of a new dynamic accumulation regime or a new stable mode of regulation.
ZÖ: In the book, you describe the current socio-ecological condition as a “monstrous normality”. How does this normalisation relate to the rise of authoritarian political responses?
UB: One often, rightly made argument is that the rise of authoritarianism is closely connected to the failure of liberal and social-democratic politics to address social insecurity, migration, and economic restructuring. The far right has been able to take advantage of this situation.
Many people feel excluded after decades of neoliberal restructuring, which was often supported by social-democratic parties themselves. There is a powerful image described by Arlie Hochschild: the metaphor of the waiting line. Workers feel that they have been waiting patiently in line to reach a better life. But suddenly they perceive that migrants or other groups move ahead of them in the queue, supported by the welfare state. The feeling then becomes: “they are overtaking me”. These perceptions are linked to broader experiences of inequality. For example, workers in relatively well-paid sectors, such as automobile workers at companies like Volkswagen may still be considered part of a labour aristocracy. Yet many of them fear that their production model is no longer sustainable. So, we also need to acknowledge that racism exists within society itself. It does not only come from above; it also exists at the level of everyday attitudes.
Additionally, and this is often overlooked in critical debates, we argue that the failure of a green capitalist project is also an aspect of the rise of the far right. The green capitalist project was often socially very unjust and triggered fear: What will happen to my car with a combustion engine? What will happen to my heating system? What will happen to my job in traditional industries? The far right exploits this situation by claiming that the established parties represent and stabilise “the system” which goes wrong, and do not challenge economic elites. In reality, far-right parties rarely confront economic power. But rhetorically they present themselves as the voice of “ordinary people.”
ZÖ: In the last chapter of the book, you propose socialisation as an alternative. How does this challenge dominant market- and growth-oriented approaches?
UB: One important point is that we want to avoid the common individualistic argument that “if people simply behaved properly, we would save the world”. From a political ecology perspective, the key question is how we organise provisioning systems. This also raises questions about norms, orientations, and capitalist accumulation imperatives and power relations. Our argument is that the investment function in the key sectors, including energy, housing, mobility, and infrastructure, needs to be socialised. In these sectors, the main problem is the private control over investment decisions and the concentration of economic power, which is closely linked to the imperative of growth and capitalist accumulation. What we propose implies something like an eco-socialist strategy, because it really questions the power of capital. This could involve taxation, forms of devaluation of capital, and different forms of socialisation.
Note: This interview gives the views of the participants and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.