Elon Musk was Time Magazine’s man of the year in 2021. By early 2025 he was an integral (albeit short lived) part of the second Trump administration, responsible for decimating FEMA and other parts of the USA’s domestic disaster preparedness infrastructure.¹ It was easy to be caught off guard by the seeming contradiction of the man who popularised the electric car being directly responsible for cancelling vital climate mitigation and adaptation programmes. 

‘Green’ consumer goods, like Musk’s cars, were to have been the innovations which would save the planet. Not only this, the electric vehicle industry was one of the most prominent parts of the emergent green economy which would spark a resurgence in manufacturing jobs. Discourse surrounding these jobs focused on Green New Deals and Just Transitions. The demand was for industrial, and thus social, renewal via fairly-paid, socially useful employment. This, of course, relied on green employers, such as Musk. This reliance was often downplayed or omitted, but without a revolutionary change to how the economy was structured, green capitalists would have been key to the imagined transition. 

Of course, some within the Marxist tradition were sceptical of such proposals.² The Green New Deal would be just another contradiction-riven stage of capitalism. However, for many Marxists, that it was contradictory seemed to imply it was impossible, and much ink was spilt showing that capitalism could never become Green. This rhetoric and analysis of ‘apocalypse’ may have lent eco-Marxist critique an urgent tone, however recent developments, in particular in the lithium battery industry, have made the critique that capitalism could never ‘green’ itself, untenable. Counter-intuitively, they have also made the Green New Deal framework untenable. 

This is where Nicholas Beuret opened the London launch of his new book Or Something Worse: Why we need to disrupt the climate transition. Beuret’s book is primarily a work of political economy seeking to map out the ‘transition economy’ in the Global North.  

This review will place Beuret’s text in critical dialogue with Thea Riofrancos’ new book Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism. Whilst these two texts have very different focuses, placing them in dialogue will illuminate how changing climatic conditions, forms of capital accumulation, geopolitical struggles and forces of repression are re-shaping what form class struggle takes. 

The green afterlives of neoliberalism

Many accounts saw the environmental struggle as a universal one. We all chanted the slogans: “There’s no money on a dead planet!”. The implication was that, whilst capitalists were driving the climate crisis, they too would suffer unless we all solved it. Perhaps the key lesson of Beuret’s text is that this was a fantasy. The political struggle was not over a universal future. Rather it was over who gets to decide whose future is liveable, whose future is not and whose future is suspended in between. This condition of being suspended between the liveable and the unliveable, forms the basis for the subjective experience of being exploited in the green transition. Beuret terms this “the squeeze”:³ 

“During the transition life will become meaner, diminished, as we all learn to live with less. And not just live with less but hope for less. As incomes fall and security disappears, our horizons will shrink. Hope, already battered by broken promises and failed investments, will dwindle along with our horizons.”⁴

For Beuret, the squeeze permeates every moment of everyday life. It is a form of “climate attrition” which manifests in a host of increasingly familiar forms.⁵ The squeeze is experienced as increasing food insecurity, ever-present inflation, disruption of energy supply, uncertainty, oppressive heat, increasingly ‘hard’ insurance markets which make homes more vulnerable and a general foreclosing of opportunities for a better life within capitalism.⁶

As the squeeze intensifies more and more care work becomes necessary but the state shows no signs of stepping in. In fact more and more this care work falls to both the private sector and the household. Whilst Green New Deal paradigms anticipate the return of the masculine industrial worker, the burden of care increasingly falls to feminized labour. When the squeeze on social reproduction drives some to desperation, they encounter the state as a repressive force. Whilst neoliberalism cut the state’s ability to support social reproduction, it increased the state’s capacity for repression. This securitisation of both everyday life and sites of capital accumulation is intensifying due to the increasing threat of resistance as capital accumulation continues to undermine the conditions of social reproduction.⁷

From the privatisation of care to the extensions to the state’s repressive capacities, Beuret sees the green transition as an intensification of the dynamics of neoliberalism, not a rupture. These continuities are indicative of the dominant strategy for capital accumulation during the green transition. For Beuret there is no innovation which will increase how much relative or absolute surplus value capital can exploit from labour. Instead, the model of accumulation which becomes clear over the course of the book is premised on what Marx termed ‘secondary exploitation’.  Capital accumulation is achieved via the squeeze. As capitalism erodes its social basis, the cost to capital of reproducing labour is decreased, meanwhile the cost to labour of reproducing itself increases through permanent inflation in food prices and rent.⁸ Appeals to the state to challenge this go largely unheeded. Instead, the state, with its over-developed repressive apparatuses, responds with crackdowns.  

These are the new conditions of exploitation, and thus also the conditions of struggle. The squeeze is “a distributional struggle” over who should bear the cost of the transition: labour or capital.⁹ But it is a massively uneven fight. On Beuret’s account the green transition is not an attempt to resist the squeeze, which capital has accepted as inevitable. Instead, the green transition is a process of adapting capital to these new climatic conditions. This is achieved through, in large part, state intervention:

“The transition aims to create an economic atmosphere conducive to investment in both capital expenditure and research leading to innovation. This is not the government directly investing in production; rather, the intention is to encourage business to invest. In the most immediate sense, the green transition amounts to the privatisation of climate change…the transition economy amounts to the production of a vast captive market, formed by government targets and state-backed monopolies.”¹⁰ 

To a more reformist reader, this might not sound like the end of the world. In fact, this might sound like the scene setting for industrial renewal which would redress the aforementioned neoliberal continuities. Beuret, however, has a different diagnosis. Within the Global North (in particular the UK) this investment has not produced a manufacturing economy, but rather an installation economy. The green manufacturing economy is elsewhere, the green transition does not reverse de-industrialisation but creates jobs installing technologies manufactured elsewhere:¹¹ 

“In place of promised manufacturing jobs, the transition economy creates installation work. Precarious, semi-skilled and largely controlled by small businesses, this work is unlikely to revive shattered communities or provide a significant number of local supply chain jobs. Instead, installation work deepens the trend towards an increasingly fragmented working class and the total dominance of the service industry in the Global North.”¹² 

This mismatch between the rhetoric of economic renewal and the reality of the squeeze means that for many, the green transition is experienced as a series of broken promises.¹³ Beuret’s concern here is not simply that this results in “a growing sense of betrayal”, but that this fuels the forces of reaction. For Beuret, the green transition not only fails to produce the kind of economy conducive to labour organising and trade union struggles, but in fact risks spurring reactionary responses to climate politics more generally. ¹⁴

Whither the state

Beuret is not alone in his pessimism. Thea Riofrancos highlights a similar continuity with neoliberalism in her book. 

Riofrancos engages the green transition from, as it were, its other end. She focuses on the extractive industries which feed the production of commodities such as solar panels, which are to be installed in the Global North. Much like Beuret, Riofrancos sees the green transition as being shaped by similar legacies of neoliberalism:¹⁵ privatisation and the uneven dismantling of state capacity; reducing regulation and control of capital; and increasing repression. Whilst Riofrancos’ text has a global focus (stressing the global nature of extractive frontiers), she spends much of her text exploring Chile, one of the world’s largest lithium producers:

“Pinochet selectively dismantled state capacities. During the dictatorship, the military saw a boon in spending, whilst social services like housing, healthcare, and education were put on the chopping block… the dictatorship did intervene in the economy. But the goal here was to encourage investment and protect private property – not to regulate capitalists. Lithium exemplifies Chile’s inability to see like a state. The nuclear agency [which has regulatory oversight over the lithium industry in Chile], despite its expansive legal mandate, had neither a laboratory to test lithium samples bound for the container ships departing Chile’s ports nor a shared database with the customs agency to ensure that export quotas were not being exceeded.”¹⁶

Riofrancos’ focus on Chile draws attention to the structural dependencies in the Global South which are shaping its role within the green transition. The Chilean state, it appears, is locked into its role as an extractive economy. It cannot afford to upset extractive capital, on which its taxation policy depends, and it cannot even properly regulate exports. Even when socialist leaders like Gabreil Boric win power, they lacked the state capacity to directly challenge capital. The green transition is reinforcing the dynamics of dependency which have long characterised North-South relations. 

Both Riofrancos and Beuret identify that the shape the green transition is taking is determined by the reliance of states, throughout the World-System, on private capital’s financial and infrastructural capabilities. Crucially, for both authors, neither the extractive nor installation economies are on track to generate the kind of capital investment which would generate the state capacity which could break these legacies of neoliberalism. The green industrial revolution is not coming. The type of industries which are dominating the green transition do not produce insulation from the physical and social impacts of climate change, do not produce stable mass employment, and crucially do not create the industrial basis for state capacity building.

These dynamics, of course, have not gone without challenge. Chile’s President Boric did attempt to overturn the Pinochet-era constitution via a referendum. This renewal of ‘Resource Nationalism’ was an attempt to bend extractive capital to the will of the nation: 

“The goals were self-evident: to maximise Chile’s benefit from its lithium wealth while simultaneously protecting vulnerable landscapes and communities. The means were likewise obvious: state ownership and regulatory muscle.”¹⁷

The process of drafting the constitution was long and laid bare the contradictions in the notion of a single national will. Environmental activists and communities living at the frontiers of the green transition proposed constitutional amendments which would have effectively banned the lithium mining draining their water reserves. They were, however, challenged not only by global capitalist corporations, but by other Chileans. Riofrancos details how the environmentalist forces focused their energies on refining the text of their amendments, and how their conservative and ‘green’ opponents focused on building a political coalition that would reject the constitution.¹⁸ One clear implication of Riofrancos’ account is that these forces of reaction did not fight fairly. There was no democratic battle of ideas, but a concerted campaign of misinformation to protect the interests of capital. Whilst the Chilean example does not discredit the notion that the state can, in principle, be a vehicle for shaping the green transition, it does underline that political struggles are not won by facts. 

In fact, some states are shaping the green transition to their advantage. Specifically, Riofrancos traces how the green transition is being seized by states in the Global North to reduce their dependency on China via ‘onshoring’, reversing the offshoring which was characteristic of the neoliberal period and bringing the work of extraction and production ‘back home’. Dealing first with the USA, Riofancos details how the first Trump administration reclassified lithium as a ‘critical mineral’, which allowed both Trump himself, and Congress, to expedite mining permits in the name of national security. Trump’s attempt to compete with China over the role of global lithium supplier was continued by the Biden administration which financially supported the mining industry, ‘de-risking’ investments by underwriting loans and financing parts of its operations.¹⁹ This support for the lithium industry has survived into Trump’s second tenure, despite his rampant climate denial. A similar picture emerges in the European Union, where state support for lithium mining and battery production is explicitly framed as a way to reduce Chinese influence:

“EU officials had begun to see the energy transition as a panacea. They realised that this transition could do much more than stem global warming and lay the foundations for a greener future. Building this future would entail new infrastructures, technologies, sectors, and trade routes. Collectively, these investments could buttress Europe’s status in a turbulent world. EU policy makers specifically looked to lithium battery supply chains, from their raw material beginning to high-tech final products, as the most strategic terrain for asserting global power.”²⁰

For Riofrancos, the green transition is conditioned not simply by the abstract dictates of capital accumulation, but by the geopolitical and geoeconomic rivalry between China and the governments of the Global North, who work in the interest of particular sectors of capital. Thus, it becomes clear how Elon Musk can simultaneously be the leading light of the electric car revolution and have a political agenda which directly undermines the global fight against climate change. Elon Musk doesn’t believe in electric vehicles nor even in the continual accumulation of capital, but rather in the continual accumulation of his own capital. Thus, whilst the states in the Global North are able to shape the green transition, they can only do so in ways which suit ‘their’ capitalists.²¹ 

This competition between states means the countries in the Global North are shaping the green transition in profoundly irrational ways to maximise rate of capital accumulation, so even if jobs do arrive, the workers who do them are still squeezed in precisely the ways Beuret outlines. This is because the transition is neither the result of concessions to organised labour, nor is it the imposition of an electoral left project. The transition belongs to men like Musk. They have shaped it and driven it forward. It resembles their interests and is shaped to maximise their profits.

This is, at least in some part, the result of the dominant strategy of the climate movement. As Beuret observes, large sections of this movement, especially in the Global North, understood themselves to be exerting pressure on their governments to act.²² There was an explicit deferral of agency to state actors. But the afterlives of neoliberalism mean that most states have incredibly limited capacity to act independently of the dictates of capital accumulation. This dependency has meant that demands for the state to act are translated into demands for the state to support capital in acting. 

This has violently rebounded on the climate movement. The translation of demands that governments act on climate into a social licence for capital to accumulate means that activists who stand in the way, and keep demanding, need to be swept aside. In the Global North this has taken the form of crackdowns on protest, in the Global South it has been lethal with “nearly two hundred land defenders killed in 2023”.²³ Across the globe environmental struggles are recast as ‘NIMBY’ movements, a crude catch-all for anyone who stands in the way of ‘development’. Riofrancos details at length how this anti-democratic politics identifies climate action with capital accumulation and paints frontline communities, who the green transition is meant to help, as ‘risks’ to the transition. The dictates of capital accumulation and geopolitics align and:

“Corporate representatives and their political allies equate opposition … with obstruction to climate action. Government officials meanwhile portray … activists as a ‘threat to national security’.”²⁴

The answer to repression is, of course, not to ‘accept the price of their transition’ but to resist it and produce our own. However, without some form of ‘counterpower’ which is able to challenge both the state and capital, there will be no progress. This is what becomes clear across both books. If Riofrancos’ work discredits the state as the centre of the struggle over who sets the terms of the climate transition, and Beuret shows that the workplaces of the transition are not conducive to good old fashioned trade union organising, then we must build power outside both. The question becomes where is the terrain of struggle?

Where do we resist? 

Riofrancos identifies the frontline communities whose homes have become the frontiers of the extractive industries as a source of resistance to capital’s green transition, highlighting their role in pushing for some of the more radical demands of Boric’s failed constitution. Whilst this attempted resurgence of Resource Nationalism may have been a failure on its own terms, it gave indigenous communities the space to centre themselves in discourses around the transition. This experience of being centred and then disappointed meant that in the aftermath of the proposed constitution’s failure, these communities were mobilising to blockade and occupy lithium mines.²⁵ Beuret similarly highlights how a feeling of betrayal has sparked ‘communities of refusal’ which are contesting the terms of the transition.²⁶ For both authors it is the betrayed community who is actually leading the struggle.²⁷ 

Riofrancos’ interest in communities stems from the fact that her analysis centres on the extractive dynamics of green capitalism, leading her to focus on the conflicts that spring up around the sites of extraction. This struggle is, on the face of it, hyper-localist, but she is quick to warn us against this interpretation:

“Communities that are successful are usually, in actuality, not acting alone. Instead, they act trans-locally, in alliance with other such locales, embedded in networks that span countries and world regions.”²⁸

For Riofrancos, resistance to capital’s green transition has the potential to spread through organisational networks along capital’s own supply chains.²⁹ If “peripheries – or frontiers – are fractal”,³⁰ then everywhere ‘green’ exploitation spreads, can become part of a unified resistance.³¹

What we now need is an account of how to build those communities.

Beuret provides an account of how it is the struggle against the experience of green capitalism which creates the kind of communities we need. A community is thus a political organisation which unifies disparate struggles.³² By understanding the unified subjective experience of the squeeze, political organisers can bring together multiple struggles into a single coherent resistance against green capitalism.

“Organising in and against their transition means starting with a ‘whole-worker’ approach… a labour organising strategy that views workers not just as employees with narrowly defined workplace concerns but instead as people embedded in their communities that face issues beyond wages and working conditions. This approach seeks to mobilise workers by addressing the full spectrum of their lives.”³³

Beuret’s focus on the ‘secondary’ exploitation of capitalism is what allows for this new terrain of struggle which can address the neoliberal assaults which made the workplace and the state such hostile sites of struggle. Secondary exploitation provides clear figures to target, from landlords to billionaire supermarket bosses, and Beuret sees the community’s embedded relationships around the sites of secondary (as well as primary) exploitation as a resource for mobilisation. In particular, the shared locality and bonds of obligation which exist in communities make them ideal for organising two particular kinds of resistance to green capitalism: the blockade and the ‘refusal’.³⁴ The former of these is a sustained campaign of direct action which prevents the accumulation of capital,³⁵ whilst the latter is a tactic of mass refusal of payment for essentials be that energy bills or food shopping.³⁶ The connections of the community ensure mutual support in the face of repression: a mass of people holding each other accountable in the face of threats and the ability to continually rotate people to allow for rest whilst continuing the fight. Key to these struggles is a refusal to accept the ‘cost’ of the green transition.

“Refusal to accept the naturalisation of the market, or the idea that climate change necessarily makes ‘us’ poorer, creates new possibilities… At its core, a refusal denies the limits imposed upon us, the efforts to shape and control our actions.”³⁷ 

 This resistance would be pedagogical, and through continued resistance, communities would grow in confidence and capacity.³⁸ By refusing these costs, in particular through expropriating those who expropriate through secondary exploitation, this movement could survive by seizing their means of survival from capital. Eventually such a movement would secure its power through political institutions at a municipal level which in turn could be used to reinforce these gains and ensuring democratic governance ‘at scale’ and thus ensure the working class does not bear the cost of the transition.³⁹ 

But there are two issues with Beuret’s argument. 

Firstly, it’s an implicitly moral argument. Beuret identifies a narrative based on an identifiable ‘villain’ as the tool which can be used to cohere the community: 

“Every campaign needs a villain. A target is not enough, we need an opposing agent, someone responsible, who can be forced to change the situation. Without a villain campaigns can, at best, be little more than protests calling for government aid.”⁴⁰

Beuret’s community organising relies on a moral story where a predatory landlord, a callous employer or a gentrifying developer is undermining the social reproduction of a community, which must be fought for. It is through the defence of this moral economy of social reproduction that the politicised unity of community comes into being and claims agency.⁴¹

However, this risks challenging only the excesses of capitalism, against the villainous capitalist who is seen to ‘squeeze’. Beuret’s positive programme rests on the claim that the green transition will not bring back the jobs. However, green capitalists are very good at co-opting sections of a community and there seems to be nothing to prevent them offering to protect some members or even some communities through investment.⁴² Beuret sees the villain as the embodiment of the squeeze and thus a figure which can unify the community in refusal of that squeeze. However, this community would fall apart should a capitalist come along and promise to reverse the squeeze and return the economy to its ‘proper’ role in supporting social reproduction through employment. There is nothing in the text to suggest Beuret would endorse a quasi-Polanyian argument about returning the economy and social reproduction to their ‘proper’ respective roles, but the risk of such co-option seems real.

Secondly, there is the question of how, precisely, the community is able to reproduce its resistance over time amidst the squeeze (assuming that the supermarkets will not remain fully stocked in the context of mass refusal to pay). The link between community and social reproduction is never outlined yet seems integral to the programme Beuret espouses. There appears to be a Murray Bookchin-esque understanding that the community can, through mutual aid, provide its own means of subsistence to subvert the mute compulsion of the wage.⁴³ Beuret seems to mobilise the much vaunted ‘resilience’ of communities, which is currently utilised by capitalism to justify cutting support to the bare minimum and expecting labour to look after itself.⁴⁴  But it is unclear how this happens. The very point of mute compulsion is that it operates because of the original dispossession of the working class from the means of subsistence.⁴⁵ How then, does the community subsist if it has already been dispossessed?

The closest Beuret gets to an answer is the appeal to municipalism. Control of municipal government, supposedly, affords the community control over housing and energy.⁴⁶ Beuret offers several examples, most relevant of which is Preston.⁴⁷ The Preston model utilises what little local authority capacity has survived the rounds of austerity budget induced asset stripping. These remaining powers are used to push immobile local institutions to increase wages and local investment, and to promote worker owned cooperatives to build community wealth.⁴⁸ Once municipal power has been achieved, it would seem that the social reproductive question can be answered politically. Our task is to get to that point.⁴⁹ 

Neither of these theoretical issues are enough to discount the potential of community organising. Rather, they highlight that if Beuret’s political strategy is to work, it needs to focus on resisting the mute compulsion of the market through the socialisation of the means of social reproduction. From there we can tackle the means of production. 

These theoretical questions must be answered practically. What they highlight is the absolute necessity of political organising to centre ‘collective need’ by finding ways to break the power of capital’s mute compulsion. Near the end of her book Riofrancos momentarily eschews the distinction between consumer and labourer.⁵⁰ In doing so she highlights how capitalism has mediated social reproduction through both these categories:⁵¹ we are only workers because we need to be paid in order to eat and we are only consumers because we need to pay to eat. To tackle mute compulsion requires we take Beuret’s ‘whole-worker’ approach and transform it into a struggle to abolish the very condition of possibility for ‘the worker’. And Beuret is aware of this:

“As the climate crisis worsens and the squeeze intensifies, the amount of work that needs doing will increase amid deteriorating conditions. Yet in the context of a community transition that takes our collective needs as their starting point, it’s time to ask whether this work should continue to be distributed so unevenly, or should remain behind the closed doors of a family home… turning the home inside out alongside the factory follows both politically and logically.”⁵²

The task for our communities is to find the avenues by which we build our own apparatus of social reproduction, which are not bound to the market and do not bind us to it either.

Bibliography

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Ajl, Max. A People’s Green New Deal. Pluto Press, 2021.

Beuret, Nicholas. Or Something Worse: Why We Need to Disrupt the Climate Transition. Verso, 2025.

Bookchin, Murray. From Urbanization to Cities: The Politics of Democratic Municipalism. AK Press, 2021.

Chaudhary, Ajay Singh. The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World. Repeater, 2024.

Chua, Charmaine, and Kai Bosworth. ‘Beyond the Chokepoint: Blockades as Social Struggles’. Antipode 55(5) https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12943

Fremantle, Jake. ‘From Ambivalence to Profanity: Resisting the Dogmatic Ideal of Community’. Harbinger: A Journal of Social Ecology, no. 3 (July 2024). https://harbinger-journal.com/issue-3/from-ambivalence-to-profanity/.

Harvey, David. Spaces of Global Capitalism. Verso, 2019.

Huber, Matthew T. Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet. Verso, 2022.

Illner, Peer. Disasters and Social Reproduction: Crisis Response between the State and Community. Mapping Social Reproduction Theory. Pluto Press, 2021.

Levidow, Les. ‘Green New Deals: What Shapes Green and Deal?’ Capitalism Nature Socialism. https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2022.2062675.

Mau, Søren. Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital. Verso, 2023.

Riofrancos, Thea. EXTRACTION: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism. ICON BOOKS, 2025.

Shafi, Azfar, and Ilyas Nagdee. Race to the Bottom: Reclaiming Antiracism. Pluto Press, 2022.

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References

1. As well as USAID, Social Security, etc. ↩︎
2. For instance Les Levidow wrote an excellent paper tracing the development of the Green New Deal concept through New Labour’s satellite think tanks and highlighted the Green New Deal’s intended role as a compromise between trade unions and their carbon intensive industries. In a different vein, Max Ajl wrote a book, A People’s Green New Deal (Pluto Press, 2021), taking aim at the imperialist tendencies underpinning the Green New Deal and its Eurocentric desire to use the mineral wealth of the Global South to kickstart a social democratic renewal in the Global North. ↩︎
3. It is worth highlighting that the squeeze is never clearly defined in the text, at least not in the way a reader may expect from an academic text. This may frustrate some readers, it frustrated me, however Beuret did not write an academic text. Instead, this book is aiming for a wider audience, who do not necessarily need or want a dense work of political ecology linking all these subjective experiences. Beuret is speaking to the mass movement who Beuret understands to be necessary for the future he envisions. This is commendable ↩︎
4. Nicholas Beuret, Or Something Worse: Why We Need to Disrupt the Climate Transition (Verso, 2025), 11. ↩︎
5. Beuret, Or Something Worse, 33 ↩︎
6. Beuret’s squeeze is very similar to the concept of ‘exhaustion’ developed by Ajay Singh Chaudhary (see: Ajay Singh Chaudhary, The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World (Repeater, 2024),166). Chaudhary’s concept is intended to cover impacts on both the material resources of an exploited region and the condition of its inhabitants. Much like Beuret’s squeeze, Chaudhary’s exhaustion is a way of understanding the subjective experience of the exploited classes during the climate crisis. Unlike Beuret’s concept, Chaudhary’s includes an assumed form of resistance: that which is exhausted refuses to do more. It’s beyond the scope of the current work to parse out the precise distinction between these two concepts or to understand their potential relationships or possible commensurability, however it is worth contextualising the squeeze within the related conceptual arsenal of eco-Marxism. ↩︎
7. Beuret, Or Something Worse, 75 ↩︎
8. Beuret, Or Something Worse, 106-7 ↩︎
9. Beuret, Or Something Worse, 143. ↩︎
10. Beuret, Or Something Worse, 81-91. ↩︎
11. Beuret sees China as the key manufacturing site of Green Capital (Beuret Or Something Worse, 93). He also, much like Thea Riofrancos, sees the wider Global South as the site of extraction, not manufacturing. What this means for the geopolitical competition between ‘The West’ and China (discussed below), and what this competition means for this installation economy, remains to be seen.  ↩︎
12. Beuret, Or Something Worse, 55-6 ↩︎
13. Beuret’s analysis of the kinds of work and workplace which the green transition is producing in the Global North comes across as a response to the arguments of a certain stand of eco-Marxism exemplified by Mattew T. Huber (see Mattew T. Huber, Climate Change as Class War:Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Verso Books, 2022). Huber is not mentioned by name, however comments such as “There is no workplace or industry that holds leverage over the entire economy” (Beuret, Or Something Worse, 16-7) are hard to read as anything other than a response to Huber’s work which centres the role of workers in electricity generation as the key agent of a green socialist project. As will become clear, Beuret’s contribution to this debate around the potential revolutionary agents of our conjuncture is to eschew the sectoral framing of Huber whilst also not embracing a locality specific account. Beuret instead offers up an account that suggests that the revolutionary agent is self-creating (forming itself through mobilisations, rather than being the product of capitalist working conditions) and  can form in nearly any location (producing itself through struggles wherever people live, as opposed to at specific sites like power stations or pipelines).  ↩︎
14. Beuret, Or Something Worse, 51 ↩︎
15. As should become clear, Riofrancos also sees the green transition as breaking with neoliberal orthodoxy, in particular she describes a resurgence in vertical integration, where companies seek to control their entire supply chain. The reliance of the transition on a handful of minerals, and the increasing geopolitical struggle over their supply, is leading to some companies to seek mitigate their exposure to risk as the Washington Consensus begins to fray.  ↩︎
16. Thea Riofrancos, EXTRACTION: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism (ICON BOOKS, 2025), 82 ↩︎
17. Riofrancos, EXTRACTION, 109 ↩︎
18. Riofrancos, EXTRACTION, 117 ↩︎
19. Riofrancos, EXTRACTION, 135. ↩︎
20. Riofrancos, EXTRACTION, 126. ↩︎
21. And of course, if leaders in the Global North ceased to make their economies attractive to ‘their capitalists’, those capitalists would quickly cease to be ‘their capitalists’.  ↩︎
22. Beuret, Or Something Worse, 111. ↩︎
23. Riofrancos, EXTRACTION, 175. ↩︎
24. Riofrancos, EXTRACTION, 186 ↩︎
25. Riofrancos, EXTRACTION, 119 ↩︎
26. Beuret, Or Something Worse, 153 ↩︎
27. This focus on ‘community’ as a key site and source of struggle is not entirely new in either Marxist or environmental circles. Marxists have often been suspicious of community given the history of invocations of ‘community’ which have acted as counter-insurgent calls to demobilise; see, for instance,  the discussion of the role of community leaders in the aftermath of the Brixton Riot in Azfar Shafi and Ilyas Nagdee, Race to the Bottom: Reclaiming Antiracism (Pluto Press, 2022). or the way in which ‘community resilience’ was used to justify abandoning Black neighbourhoods in the wake of Hurricane Katrina Peer Illner, Disasters and Social Reproduction: Crisis Response between the State and Community, Mapping Social Reproduction Theory (Pluto Press, 2021). On the other hand, environmentalists have often been optimistic about the potential for ‘the community’ to be a wellspring of resistance, in particular those environmentalists influenced by Murray Bookchin. ↩︎
28. Riofrancos, EXTRACTION, 194. ↩︎
29. Riofrancos, EXTRACTION, 213 ↩︎
30. Riofrancos, EXTRACTION, 198. ↩︎
31. This goes someway to diffuse some of the more metaphysical concerns one can have with invocations of ‘community’, such as ‘who is included in a community, who sets the bounds of inclusion and who determines the aims of this community’. ↩︎
32. Beuret, Or Something Worse, 182.  ↩︎
33. Beuret, Or Something Worse, 166. ↩︎
34. In doing so, Beuret adds his voice to those calling for the blockades to be seen “not merely as tactics or pure negations of capital, but instead are articulations of collective life and open-ended attempts to build power.” ↩︎
35. Beuret, Or Something Worse, 123.  ↩︎
36. Beuret, Or Something Worse, 139. ↩︎
37. Beuret, Or Something Worse, 151.  ↩︎
38. Beuret, Or Something Worse, 134.  ↩︎
39. Beuret, Or Something Worse, 175  ↩︎
40. Beuret, Or Something Worse, 152.  ↩︎
41. Beuret, Or Something Worse, 145. ↩︎
42. Riofrancos, EXTRACTION, 95. ↩︎
43. Murray Bookchin, From Urbanization to Cities: The Politics of Democratic Municipalism (AK Press, 2021), 220.  ↩︎
44. Chaudhary, The Exhausted of the Earth, 164.  ↩︎
45. Søren Mau, Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital (Verso, 2023), 185. ↩︎
46. Beuret, Or Something Worse, 176.  ↩︎
47. Including the Zapatistas, who are worthy of note here because of how different they are from the communities in the UK which are resisting the squeeze. Communities in the UK are already fully subsumed by the wage relation. They are facing job losses and the demise of the social wage, meaning they have quite a different starting point than communities which are resisting the very primitive accumulation which would make one subject to mute compulsion (David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism (Verso, 2019), 63). Key here is the Zapatistas’ food sovereignty which allows for social reproduction outside the wage relation ↩︎
48. Beuret, Or Something Worse, 175. ↩︎
49. How this is to be achieved is left unsaid. It would obviously be expecting too much to want Beuret to provide a roadmap to political power. However, it must be acknowledged that there will be massive challenges in the process of overcoming this gap between being a short term campaign based on refusal or blockade, and then going onto seizing institutional power sufficient to provide for the social reproduction of an entire community. Maintaining that power in the face of the inevitable assaults from capital and the state will be yet another challenge. These challenges are evident in Riofrancos’ discussion of the Boric government and without such a conjunctural specific institutional analysis Beuret’s strategy cannot be implemented. ↩︎
50. Riofrancos, EXTRACTION, 213. ↩︎
51. Without, of course, ignoring the vast differences between those who produce at one end of global supply chains and those who consume at the other. ↩︎
52. Beuret, Or Something Worse, 187-8. ↩︎