Hyper-Nationalism, Neo-Fascism and the Destruction of Nature: Part-1
(Translated into English from Orginal Bengali Text)
Introduction
The ecological crisis has become one of the defining conditions of the 21 st century. From forests to coastal plains, landscapes are being destroyed, climatic extremes are intensifying, and millions of people face displacement and livelihood insecurity. Climate change has made the scale of ecological disruption impossible to ignore. Yet it cannot be understood simply as a crisis of the natural world. It is also a crisis of the social and economic relations through which human societies organise their relationship with nature.
The roots of the contemporary ecological crisis lie deep in the history of capitalist production. Capitalism does not merely use nature as an external resource; it continually reorganises nature according to the requirements of accumulation. Forests become timber, mountains become mineral deposits, rivers become hydroelectric potential, land becomes infrastructure or real estate, and fossil fuels become energy to expand production. The capitalist transformation of nature is therefore at once an economic, ecological and political process.
The political dimension of this process becomes especially important in the context of contemporary authoritarianism and hyper-nationalism. The history of fascism shows that authoritarian projects do not confine domination to human populations. They also remake territory, labour, resources and landscapes through militarisation, war, occupation and extraction. Militarisation itself produces extensive ecological damage through weapon manufacturing, military infrastructure, warfare and territorial control. The relationship cannot be reduced to the claim that fascism simply 'destroys nature'. The more important question is how capital, state power, colonialism, militarisation and ecological destruction become interconnected and mutually reinforcing.
The present times make this question particularly urgent. Across the world, far-right movements and authoritarian regimes have expanded amid economic insecurity, political disillusionment and the weakening of democratic institutions. At the same time, climate change is intensifying displacement, resource conflict and social insecurity. The neoliberal transformation of social democracy and the declining capacity of established centre-left politics to mediate class conflict have created openings through which economic and social grievances are increasingly redirected toward nationalism and authoritarianism.
These developments must be understood together. The ecological crisis has emerged through a historical process in which capital accumulation turns nature into an object of extraction; states secure the territorial and institutional conditions for that extraction; militarisation protects strategic resources and geopolitical interests; and authoritarian nationalism supplies the ideological and coercive framework through which dispossession and repression are legitimised.
Capitalism and the Historical Transformation of Nature
The consolidation of industrial capitalism in 19th-century Europe profoundly changed the relationship between society and nature. Coal, wood, and later oil became increasingly important sources of industrial energy. Steam power enabled factories and transport systems to expand beyond many of the geographical and ecological limits that had shaped earlier forms of production. The significance of this change extended far beyond technological innovation.
The development of thermodynamics in the 19 th century also helped recast energy as an abstract, transferable productive force. Natural processes could be harnessed to generate energy to power machines, transport commodities, and expand production. The relationship among labour, machinery and nature was consequently reorganised around productivity and accumulation.
Capitalism produced more than a new energy system. Forests, rivers, minerals and fossil fuels were increasingly mapped, measured, extracted, transported and incorporated into commodity production. Their value came to be determined primarily by their utility to industry. This transformation separated people from nature and labour from many of its social and ecological conditions. Capitalist production increasingly detached production from the specific ecological relationships through which communities had historically reproduced themselves. Nature appeared ever more as a reservoir of productive potential.
The problem, therefore, is not simply that capitalism uses too many resources. It is that capitalist value relations systematically treat nature as an external condition of accumulation.
Fossil Fuel Capital and the Climate Contradiction
Coal became one of the central energy foundations of industrial capitalism, especially in Europe. Steam power, generated through coal and water, enabled capital to overcome geographical and biological limits on industrial growth. As Andreas Malm argues, fossil energy did not merely provide capitalism with more power; it also enabled new spatial arrangements, allowing production and labour to be concentrated and industrial capital to expand. The consequences were vast. Coal mining transformed forests and landscapes; railways and ports were built to facilitate extraction and transportation; and oil and gas opened new geopolitical frontiers. Fossil fuel-powered industry also caused the large-scale accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
The climate crisis is therefore not an accidental externality of modern development. It is historically bound to the energy regimes through which capitalist production expanded. The responsibility for climate change is profoundly unequal, too. Industrialisation in Europe and North America generated a disproportionate share of cumulative emissions. At the same time, populations in the Global South have faced some of the most severe consequences of ecological and climatic disruption.
The fundamental contradiction is clear: the economic system that generated the climate crisis is simultaneously expected to organise its solution.
Colonialism, Imperialism and the Appropriation of Nature
The expansion of industrial capitalism beyond Europe required access to land, labour, minerals, forests and markets on an increasingly global scale. Colonialism supplied the political and territorial mechanisms through which these resources could be appropriated. It was therefore not only a system of political domination, but also an ecological project.
European imperial expansion transformed landscapes, agricultural systems, forests and resource relations. In India, land-use change under colonial rule was closely associated with the expansion of commercial forestry, mining, plantations and infrastructure. Colonial authorities reclassified and managed forests as sources of timber and revenue, altering ecological systems and undermining established relationships between forest-dependent communities and their environments. A forest embedded in systems of food gathering, medicinal herb and fuel collection, grazing, culture, and social reproduction could be redefined as a state revenue reserve. It signified more than a change in land use: it was a new political interpretation of nature. The state defined and regulated nature, capital assigned it exchange value, and communities increasingly lost control over the ecological systems on which their social reproduction depended. Contemporary extractive politics continues to bear this historical legacy.
Neoliberal Globalisation and the Reorganisation of the State-Capital Relationship
The neoliberal transformation of the late 20 th century reorganised the relationship between capital and the state without eliminating state power. Production became highly globalised through multinational corporations, global supply chains and financial institutions. Raw materials could be extracted in one region, processed in another, assembled elsewhere and sold across the world. The state increasingly acted to secure the conditions required for investment, infrastructure and accumulation. This transformation intensified competition over strategic resources, making oil, gas, minerals and transport corridors central to geopolitical rivalry.
The wars in West Asia demonstrate the significance of this relationship. The Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq took place within a geopolitical order in which oil, military power and strategic territorial control were deeply intertwined. Imperialism did not disappear with formal decolonisation; it continued through military alliances, geopolitical competition, resource politics and corporate interests. Militarisation thus became not merely a response to political conflict but also an integral component of global accumulation.
Militarisation, Contemporary Wars and the Ecological Political Economy of Destruction
Militarisation is a structural mechanism through which states, corporations and competing geopolitical blocs organise territory, resources, energy and accumulation. Its ecological effects are therefore not incidental by-products of war. The wars of the 21 st century make this starkly visible.
The Russia-Ukraine war has damaged forests, agricultural land, water systems and infrastructure, producing environmental effects that extend well beyond the battlefield. The brutal Israeli assault on Gaza reveals an even more concentrated relationship among militarisation, territorial destruction and ecological crisis. UNEP's September 2025 assessment found unprecedented damage to Gaza's soils, freshwater systems and coastline, and estimated that damaged and destroyed buildings had generated about 61 million tonnes of debris.
These wars cannot be understood solely through the language of military strategy or national security. Behind missiles, aircraft, tanks, drones and military logistics stand extensive networks of mining, energy production, manufacturing, finance and technological research. The global arms industry is consequently part of a much wider political economy of accumulation.
This political economy has expanded dramatically. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimates that global military expenditure reached US$2.88 trillion in 2025, the eleventh consecutive year of growth. European military expenditure rose by 14 per cent, while in Asia and Oceania it increased by 8.1 per cent. India remained the world's fifth-largest military spender, increasing its military budget by 8.9 per cent to US$92.1 billion. These figures matter beyond the budgets themselves: they show the growing political centrality of military power precisely as states also confront climate breakdown, ecological degradation and social inequality.
The wars in Ukraine and Gaza, continuing conflicts in Sudan, South Sudan and Yemen, and intensifying military competition across Europe, West Asia and the Indo-Pacific point to a broader rearrangement of the international order. The post-Cold War expectation that economic globalisation would progressively diminish the political importance of military power has not materialised. Strategic minerals, energy security, arms production, territorial control and geopolitical rivalry have instead moved closer to the centre of the international political economy.
War destroys, but destruction also creates future markets for reconstruction, infrastructure, energy, steel, cement, technology and finance. Militarisation must therefore be placed at the centre of political ecology. The ecological crisis cannot be adequately addressed while military power remains outside the climate debate. A political understanding of climate change must ask not only how much carbon factories and automobiles emit, but which states are militarising, which corporations profit from war, which territories are occupied or fallen prey to corporate extraction, and whose lives and ecosystems are treated as expendable in the pursuit of profit accumulation and geopolitical power.
From Neoliberal Crisis to Hyper-Nationalism: The Transformation of Social Democracy
The expansion of digital and extractive capitalism today coincides with a deepening political crisis. Contemporary capitalism is defined not only by ecological destruction, but also by the declining capacity of political institutions to address its contradictions or offer credible alternatives. This is particularly evident in the transformation of social democracy.
For much of the 20th century, social-democratic politics addressed capitalist contradictions through welfare provision, redistribution, labour rights, public services and democratic regulation. Neoliberal restructuring progressively weakened this settlement by shifting power towards finance and corporations, weakening organised labour and reducing the redistributive capacity of the welfare state. Major sections of social democracy also moved towards the political centre and accepted important elements of neoliberal economic policy. The result is not merely electoral decline, but a crisis of political mediation: growing insecurity is increasingly detached from a collective language capable of explaining its structural causes.
This vacuum has created an opening for the far right. Today, hyper-nationalism redirects economic and social discontent towards imagined internal enemies instead of confronting the structural power of capital. Economic insecurity is translated into cultural resentment, while a crisis of representation becomes a demand for order and authoritarian leadership. Richard Seymour's concept of 'disaster nationalism' illuminates how far-right politics converts catastrophe, social despair and perceived civilisational decline into narratives of exclusion. Migrants, minorities, political opponents and imagined conspiratorial forces are made identifiable enemies. At the same time, ecological breakdown is recast as the consequence of migration, population pressure or foreign interference rather than of structural relations of production and power.
The decline of social democracy does not automatically produce fascism, and contemporary far-right formations remain historically distinct from classical fascism. Yet the weakening of redistributive institutions and democratic mediation creates openings for authoritarian nationalism. The political struggle over climate change is therefore also a struggle over how catastrophe is interpreted, who is blamed, and what form of social order emerges from a crisis. Under these conditions, ecological breakdown can become compatible with neo-fascist politics.
(To Be Continued.)
Photo: Kushal Kar