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Indigenous Activists Tom Goldtooth & Eriel Deranger on the Link Between Colonialism & Climate Crisis (Video=1:45-6:44)

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Colonial-Capital relations vs the Climate

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Colonial-Capital relations vs the Climate

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Environmental racism is a term used to describe the unequal distribution of environmental hazards and pollution in low-income communities and communities of color. Environmental racism intersects with capital-colonial relations because of the societal devaluation and extraction of peoples, land, and labor. Devaluzed BIPOC communities are often the first to experience contaminated, polluted water, due to neighborhood segregation and state disregard for life. In capital-colonial relations populations of surplus must be converted into profits, and historically this has intersected with colonial hierarchical lense as White identity equaling privileges of deservingness in a racial caste system. Climate apartheid defines the frameworks of inequality which are prevalent in our social systems due to historical Global North exploitation and extraction of the Global South. These social and material starifications are not only going to be exacerbated by the climate crisis, but the effects of the climate crisis will be predominantly felt worst in the Global South, which is not contributing nearly as much as the Global North.

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Indigenous Activists Tom Goldtooth & Eriel Deranger on the Link Between Colonialism & Climate Crisis

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First published in Der Spiegel, Germany, September 23, 2018 | By Chappatte

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The capitalist devaluing of land as private property enables colonial devaluing of differing epistemologies that don't center capitalist relations and outcomes. Indigenous sovereignty and epistemology that centered place based communal memory and maintaining relational responsibility did not center human wants as supreme but the maintenance of freedom to life for future generations as such. Racial capital-colonial relations need to (re)produce difference through hierarchy and logics of deservingness vs surplus. To maximize profits on devalued surplus racial capital-colonial relations (re)produce extraction and devaluing of Indigenous sovereignty to establish the settler state as a state in it's absence, to legitimize itself. Through demonizing Indigeneity as a racialized subject while simultaneously enforcing gender & sexuality hierarchies and pathologizing those who not conforming to Western cis-heteronormativity, the Western settler state seeks to use capitalist-colonial logics to erase and absorb Indigenity to produce material benefit for the few.

I used the above picture to demonstrate the historical path we are still on from colonial-capital relations and ways of doing. The climate crisis is exacerbated and has been created by the Global North and the Criminal Empires that construct the global hegemony. The Global South faces the worst effects and they are coming fast, yet they are not the biggest contributors. This is a continuation of the Global north designating others as surplus to nominate themselves as deserving.

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1911 American cartoon issued by Nedeljkovich, Brashich, and Kuharich

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Capitalism is an economic system characterized by private ownership determined by competition in a "free market". The goal is to make a profit (positive feedback loop), but profitability is dependant on both keeping wages as low as possible, while selling all goods produced. This system of logics seeks to infinitely expand through profits, investments, and divestments. "The origins of whiteness as property lie in the parallel systems of domination of Black and Native American peoples out of which were created racially contingent forms of property rights." (Harris)

The mode of production vs human difference epistemological framework combine to create a construct of dominance: Whiteness that hinges on epistemological hegemony(dominance of knowledge reproduction) and violence. This establishes frameworks that use racial and patriarchal (through gender) capitalism way of doing and knowing (epistemology) to reproduce premature death of devalued populations. Crisis occur when the social formation can no longer be reproduced. Surplus are the extra, unused capacities, of the state, which are not being domestically or commercially exploited. Capital-colonial relations create a caste system of deservingness vs surplus, through which Indigenity is expropriated and devalued. White identity becomes the basis of racialized privilege that becomes (re)produced and legitimized in law as status property. Race, gender, and class work together to create the construct of White hegemony. This coincides with the extraction of land and labor that create extreme stratification and difference for the benefit of the few. This happens in numerous ways, which I think the picture shows.

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Iceberg model of capitalist patriarchal economies. By Ecosocialist Horizons

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Racialized Capitalism seeks to stratify by categorizing identity as social markers to be used as lenses to designate legal and human rights through discourses of deservingness vs surplus. Capitalism needs impoverished groups because there needs to be a bottom class of people for the mass benefits of exploitation to have that margin of success. Through devaluing "surplus" or otherwise relegated to resource only populations and ways of life, stratification occurs. Settler colonialism is a framework for understanding formations of race and gender through a Western dominating, hierarchical lense. Western hegemony erases and devalues others to instate itself as superior and legitimate.

Land broadly conceptualized as private property exemplifies this settler state disregard for communal, place based living and way of life. Colonial-capital logics justify the settler want for land and labor, through pathologizing and absorbing Indigenous sovereignty to legitimize settler state identity. This connects to settler view over land relations, which enable the devaluation of land into only as valuable as humans need/designate it. This both disregards Indigenous epistemology and the relational empathy needed to maintain pathways of life outside of humans. The logics of land as private property serve to function as a mechanism of settler domination and enable disregard to peoples, lands, and the communal obligation we all share.These understandings of racial = biological basis further conflate culture with Western science (& Authority), reproduce themselves as natural through Indigenous and other premature physical & social death, further erasing Indigenous sovereignty (freedom of belonging outside of capital-colonial relations) and way of doing.