Thea Riofrancos is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College and a member of the climate + community project. Her research focuses on resource extraction, renewable energy, climate change, green technology, social movements, and the left in Latin America. She is the author of Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador and coauthor of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal. She is currently writing a book entitled Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism.
This interview has been condensed and edited for content and clarity.
MH: You are adept at thinking about strategy and navigating the particular conditions we face. You do that with your research, but also in your organizing. Is there anything you could say about how you came by those skills and how you came by the ability to think like that? How would you describe your general approach to strategy and strategic thinking?
TR: Thanks. That's a big question, I'm going to do my best with it. I think there are two separate things, at least, that you're identifying or asking me about. One is—I don't exactly know why this is, I’m sure Freud could explain it to us—I’m in some way drawn to situations that are conflictual or contentious within the left but that I think need to be confronted. Maybe not fully resolved; there's not always a resolution to every problem, but there are ways to address problems and to transcend aspects of them. I think that inclination is relevant both to why I was interested in studying extraction in the context of a left-wing government, which constantly poses all sorts of difficulties for me as an environmentalist and a leftist.
There's a lot of antagonism and controversies and polemics—and I'm not judging either side of any of this, I'm just characterizing them—when we talk about what international solidarity looks like from the perspective of the Global North, to go to a topic that is contentious within a country in the Global South among leftists in that country, and to do so from the positionality of a Global North solidarity activist. I am part Latin American, but I don't think that matters here. So I'm putting myself in a situation where it's hard to know what the right thing is, and it's easy to understand why reasonable, well-intentioned, and good faith people disagree. The disagreement itself can be productive, but I think that, in the case of the politics of extraction in Latin America, has led to some deep and unfortunate and pretty consequential divisions within the left. But I’m drawn to that conflict or that dilemma because I think that if leftists are arguing over something, it doesn't automatically mean it's worth arguing over, but I think it's a clue that there's some difficult challenge there that the left hasn't agreed upon a way to address, and I'm interested in that.
I think the same thing about my current research, which is conflictual and divisive in a different way. I'm working right now on the global lithium sector and its connections to the energy transition, and there isn't a clear or consensus left or ecosocialist analysis of that difficulty. What do we do? Do we have a pure anti-extractive position? Do we have a position that governments in the Global South should just nationalize it or have worker ownership? Do we think we should go for degrowth, so we just minimize how much extraction is required? Do we think working class people all deserve EVs? I don't know. I don't agree with all those positions, but I think they can all be made in good faith. I actually think that there might even be less of a neat resolution to that dilemma than to the prior one, but they're both pretty challenging for leftists around the world.
So part of whatever you're identifying in my approach or capabilities I think has come from, for whatever perverse reason, just being attracted to difficult issues that don't have neat resolutions. Then I think the only thing one can do is think about how that conflict can be productive. That can even go to the micro level of how do you facilitate a good faith debate over something that people disagree on? What kind of norms and movements allow for open debate and discussion and changes of positions? How do you look at the political terrain around you and analyze it, and then reflect that analysis in your strategy with the assumption that the terrain is always shifting, and that we're probably never really in a dominant position on that terrain? Or not never, it could happen and it has happened historically, but it's not the case now in the US left. So that gives you a little bit of a sense of how I see politics and what types of issues I'm drawn to.
I'll just add one other thing, which is maybe a different way of saying what I just said, but a little more routed through my biography. I've gone through pendulum swings in terms of my own politics, but I've always been on the left ever since I was 13 or 14 and could think in that way. I got politicized young, thanks in part to my dad who imparted a lot of radical views to me at a young age, but also for other reasons. I've gone from being an anti-electoral anarchist to being a Green New Deal enthusiast—which I think involves, in my view at least, a role for the state—to being someone that can comfortably say I liked Biden's first stimulus. That shouldn't exclude me from the left, to be able to say like, “This policy is good.” When I was 17, I couldn't even imagine a US president making any policy decision that I supported. Like when Biden pulled out of Afghanistan. It's not like he did it well, but I was in favor of that. During the War on Terror years, during which a lot of my politicization happened, it would have been unimaginable for me for a president to do that.
I want to be honest, and I want to give a full range of the different types of positions I've taken at different moments. I hope that doesn't mean I just go with the political winds. I think what it means, at least being more generous to myself, is that I try to evaluate things from a materialist perspective. What's going on in the world right now and what kind of response does that require or enable? What does emancipation look like at this moment, and what would be the route to it given the composition of the working class at this moment? Not at some other moment, not in our future utopia, not in 20th century Russia; I mean now. I think that means that you have to be open to change without that meaning that you are adulterating your leftism or you're moderating. I think that strategic flexibility is required by materialism, basically.
Not to say I'm always right—which I don't think at all, I disagree with myself over time—but I think it made a lot more sense to be a kind of anarchist in the late 90s and early 2000s, when there was just no obvious route to left electoral power in the US. I think it makes less sense to be one now and I would argue, again in good faith, with anarchist comrades because I think obviously the left can come to power, whether it's in Congress or whether it's in a city or state. Maybe not the president yet, but even a Bernie Sanders campaign of the type we witnessed two electoral cycles in a row was unimaginable to me in the early 2000s. I just think you have to be attentive to possibilities and situate your politics just at the horizon beyond what is immediately possible, but not in a horizon that is totally unimaginable. That's a thing to negotiate in conversation with others. It's not about individual genius, it's about collaborative discussion. There's some sweet spot where you're pushing but you're not setting yourself up for nihilistic sadness because you never get what you want. It's hard to know exactly where that is, just through practice over time.
So you have to just allow yourself that flexibility, and then hopefully that flexibility also makes you more open to disagreement and difference. That's why I'm in a multi-tendency organization, DSA. That’s why as long as it seems that people are bringing their authentic feelings and opinions to the table, so long as you can assume that good faith and sincerity, I am open to pretty deep disagreements and that being the route to improving our strategy. I hope that I can empathize with some different positions, because odds are I've held them at one point in my life. That's my corny biographical way of answering that question.
One thing you’ve written about that I feel like gets overlooked a lot in left strategic conversations is that capital is not monolithic and that there are factions and conflicts within it, and those are divides that can be exploited to our advantage. Can you say more about that? Or maybe some of those divides that you might see in present conditions?
It's always been the case that different capitalists have different interests, especially vis-à-vis state policies or just in general, but here we're talking about the state-capital nexus—what types of policies different fractions or sectors of capital lobby for or resist, and sometimes those are at cross-purposes. For example, in a context of deindustrialization and declining manufacturing, it might be that manufacturing or heavy industry sectors are pretty open to forms of protectionism, like trade protectionism, subsidies, or help from the government—seeming deviations from a more orthodox neoliberalism—because they can't compete globally. Some of what distinguishes the interests of different segments of capital is their relationship to global markets: how competitive they are, how on the vanguard they are, versus whether they've been stagnant in their innovation and they can't keep up with competitors from elsewhere in the world. So a less competitive sector or firm is always more interested in protectionism than a more competitive one is. That's just a basic obvious distinction, but it's one to one to start with and that is relevant today.
Then there are sectors that, by their nature and by the nature of how global capitalism is organized, are very footloose and globetrotting. Finance, for example, is a sector like that. But in many ways, actually, so is manufacturing. Manufacturing has been offshored around the world, it operates via these very complex supply chains. Some people talk about a global factory because you can't even think about a factory in one place; its operations and its logistics that support it are globalized. Other segments of the economy are very rooted in their place, and you can't really move them easily, like service sectors, teaching, or hospitals. That generates different interests vis-à-vis nation states and global institutions and global markets, whether it's easy to move if you don't like certain regulations, or whether you're stuck here no matter what.
Now we get a little closer to my interest with more extractive sectors. Those are more of the rooted-in-place category seemingly, because the deposits that they extract, whether it's minerals or oil or whatever it is, are in a certain place and they're stuck with that. Especially if they begin to make investments in the infrastructure of extraction, they're really stuck there. And that can actually sometimes give governments the upper hand in negotiating with them: if you want to extract this oil and you've already built the rig and everything, you're going to have to deal with our regulations or our revenue structure. But also these sectors are very globalized, very imbricated in global finance, and there's always more resources to be exploited than are currently exploited, and companies or sectors do move around. These are some ways to think about why firms or sectors might have different interests vis-à-vis state policies.
I want to go to a particular distinction between different parts of capital that is relevant to our interests here I think, which is between fossil capital and green capital. Some people don't like the term “green capitalism.” I don't mean that green capitalism is sustainable, I just mean that so-called green sectors are sites of accumulation. But I do like it as a term actually, because it sounds contradictory: green capitalism, what is that? Okay, let's think about it for a moment. What would it mean to see nature or green technologies as sites of profitability rather than as ways to save the world or something? I like that it's a confusing term a little bit. Fossil capitalism is less confusing because we associate capitalism and oil extraction very deeply.
At first glance, these seem like very different sectors than I think they are. I do want to note right away that the same firms can be both. The major multinational oil companies, slowly and not enough, have made investments in renewable assets and also green technology assets. They're diversifying because they see the writing on the wall, but they also see that the writing on the wall is faint; it's not exactly clear that they're about to be expropriated of their oil assets. I think that they intelligently know that governments are really dithering, because of their own lobbying and other reasons, are really delaying any strict climate or emissions timeline. So these companies have no incentive to fully divest their fossil fuel assets at all, but they do have incentives to diversify, and at some point, there might be stronger incentives for them to actually start shedding some of these fossil fuel assets. The point that I'm bringing up is that on the level of a firm, you can operate in both of these segments of capitalism, so they're not opposed to one another. But I do think that they clarify that there can be different orientations towards policy change by these different segments. Obviously fossil fuel companies, to a lesser but important degree utility companies, the auto companies that are less able to transition to electric vehicles, and a bunch of subsidiary industries that exist around fossil fuel extraction, all of those industries are deadlocked against stringent emissions targets and certainly against any supply-side policies that would restrict extraction.
Green capitalists are not against emissions targets because emissions targets create an industry for them. Emissions targets are profitable for them in the sense that if you have stringent emission targets, you are basically forcing that economy to require the services of green capitalists in one way or another. I'm not saying they're ecosocialist-level, like let's dramatically scale down emissions, but they are open to emissions targets. They're not lobbying against them to my knowledge. And they're very open to state support of renewable energy and other green sectors. I don't think that ecosocialists’ interests, and of course not vision of the kind of society that we want to create, are aligned with green capitalists. However, there is such a thing as a tactical alliance, which is a conjunctural alliance. Circumstantially, we may be on the same side of X legislation. That doesn't mean you coordinate with green capitalists, it just means that you are materialists and you recognize the fact that something you're fighting for is also something that is in their interest and they may be lobbying for.
That's at a more macro level. Both us and green capitalists want to transition to a more renewable economy, but how we want to do so, through what means, and with what exact policies, is quite different. So let's say Build Back Better is more likely to pass and there's this final push. I'm not saying that we'd be at a press conference with some renewable energy corporation, I'm just saying that we might both be simultaneously putting out public statements that we want Build Back Better to pass. But in a totally other arena of conflict with that same corporation, we would be doing battle with them because we would want their workers to own it, we’d want a public takeover, we'd want much more stringent regulations on their supply chains, we'd want them to be more financially regulated, we'd want dividends to working class communities from their operations. These are all demands that I can imagine placing on a renewable energy company and that we have as DSA chapters done.
So I think looking at capital as not monolithic does three things primarily. One is that you can make sense of not every capitalist being on the same side of every issue and you can understand splits in the ruling class. Two is you can take advantage of those splits in the ruling class, which are not just good for transformative social change, they're absolutely necessary. I don't think there's any revolution—and I mean real revolution, not what we're organizing in DSA—social revolutions that have totally upended society, in Cuba, China, Russia, there's been no such revolution without serious fragmentation and dissensus among the ruling elites of the prior society. It just never happens. You need that opening; if you face total hegemony, total interlocking elite consensus, it's really hard to push through. And it's hard for people to imagine something otherwise, because elites all agree with one another and that's how hegemony happens.
Third, and this might be a more controversial point, we are in a moment of energy transition, so we have to think in transitional terms. It might be that at certain moments, there are tactical, temporary alignments between forward-looking, innovative, transitional fractions of the capitalist class and people fighting for much deeper and more radical forms of ecosocial justice. Those are tactical alignments. They're not collaborations we seek out and we don’t join the same lobbying group, but they're momentary tactical alignments where you're pushing materially in the same direction on the political system. That can happen and we need to be comfortable with that fact and not feel it means something bad about us or our politics and comfortable with simultaneously seeing those people as our enemies in an emergent green capitalism.
When green capitalism is capitalism, when capitalism runs on renewable energy, those are just bosses and landlords and corporate executives, and those are the people that we’re fighting in class conflict. But in a transitional moment, I think there's a little more complexity to how we analyze the relationship between ecosocialists and green capitalists because there's a general directionality of change that we're both fighting for. But as soon as that change is consolidated, and, importantly, while it's being consolidated, I think there's also a class conflict between us.
I don't expect you to have the answer to this, but given the challenging conditions we face, what do you think DSA and the US left should be looking to be doing right now?
I think that the first thing that we need to do is analyze the situation, and I'm not just saying that because I'm a professor or an intellectual who thinks change comes from ideas, which I do not. Because we have no collective consensus on what the eff is going on out there. I think that we're all tired, a little down and depressed politically, verging sometimes on nihilism or real cynicism about what's possible. I see this in my own self and I recognize it in others. I think those emotions breed infighting and nitpicking and not approaching things from a clear-headed, good faith perspective. I think that the situation is legitimately confusing. I'm a political scientist, and I find myself less and less certain about what is happening and where we are going. Are things getting much worse? Are there some bright spots? Is it a mix of both? Will they get worse before they get better? Which we can't afford in terms of climate or people's material conditions; we should not be accelerationists because it's just too damaging. We shouldn't want things to get more immiserated before we get something more revolutionary on the table because it is just too harmful to everyday people and the planet to suffer more for the sake of a revolutionary opening.
So you need to keep organizing in the daily grind kind of way. But I do just think that there is a lack of clarity, and I include myself in this but also with the knowledge that not everyone has the resources, privilege, and time that I do to read two newspapers a day and know what's happening elsewhere in the world, which is very helpful for perspective. Good and bad perspective. Bad things are happening elsewhere, but also good things are happening elsewhere, which helps you orient a little bit. So I think that with the knowledge that time is precious under capitalism and that not everyone has time to fully immerse themselves in what is happening. Also things are intentionally opaque and complex when we look at our own political system. I could just as easily imagine another George Floyd-type uprising—of which there are constant and daily triggers for in our society—as I can imagine a constitutional crisis, as I can imagine a more fascist president than Trump, as I can imagine just Biden winning again and passing some meager policies that placate people. Those all seem equally imaginable to me. I think about this stuff a lot and don't know more than anyone else which way it's going to go.
So the thing that I'm trying to say is that I would really like there to be fora, opportunities, events, and discussion groups in DSA—and there are but more of them and more coordinated and systematic—where the goal of them is not yet to design the strategy, but rather to come to some mutual understanding or an overlapping set of understandings about what the political context is, what the economic context is. What is capitalism doing right now? Where are the key nodes of class conflict? Why are some workers striking in some sectors and not in others? Why do some workers just quit and not think about collective organizing? Why is all this stuff happening? Are we in a more or less neoliberal hegemony moment than before, as we were discussing earlier? What's going to happen with the court shutting down anything like a Green New Deal if they shut down things that are much less radical but that do try to protect workers or environmental safety? What is going on? I think that that is a question that's not well asked or answered on Twitter, and even chapter meetings with ordinary chapter business to get through are not always the space for that.
I have lots of ideas about what DSA could do better, but I don't actually think that ideas about potential strategies are what we need first. I think we first need a deeper understanding of the terrain in which we're operating, and more clarity and honesty about some of the obstacles that have been erected to some of our most dearly cherished objectives, like a Green New Deal. I think it does not help to lie about those or be dishonest or ignore them, or assume that the tactics you've always used are the ones that are going to transcend them. So I think that's where I would start a strategic conversation.
This interview has been condensed and edited for content and clarity.