It struck me while reading Adam Hanieh’s wonderful book Crude Capitalism on an exercise bike at the gym that it is really problematic to consume fossil fuels to work up a sweat.1Adam Hanieh, Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power and the Making of the World Market (London: Verso, 2024). Not only was the exercise bike plugged in, but I actually drove to the gym for my workout. The contradiction of using fossil fuel-derived energy to mobilize my own muscle power brought home to me the ways that oil-centered capitalist development is not only all around me, but also right inside me, shaping my relationship with my own body.
As I am much cruder than Adam Hanieh, my thoughts slipped to the ways fossil fuel-centered capitalist development is reflected in the glistening oiled-up bodies so typical of certain kinds of porn imagery. The unsustainably slick, frictionless body—hardened by a strict regime of training, diet, and supplements—is a recurring staple of gay porn. These images of shining lubed bodies slid from gay porn into mainstream advertising in the 1980s, as the sexualization of male bodies began to take a more prominent place in marketing, alongside the ever-present objectification of women.
While not all of the potions used to shine up or lubricate our bodies are derived from crude oil, I was surprised at how many are, including petroleum jelly (Vaseline) and mineral oils. But the influence of crude oil-derived products is more than skin deep. Reading Crude Capitalism through the thoughts developed in my book Eros and Alienation, I began to realize that oil-centred capitalist development has specific erotic dimensions, conditioning the ways we experience our bodies and our desires.2Alan Sears, Eros and Alienation: Capitalism and the Making of Gendered Sexualities (London: Pluto, 2025). The alterations to our bodies’ rhythms and desires brought on by capitalism have been shaped in specific ways by fossil-fueled mechanization. We reshape the ways we work and live together by modifying our ecological relations.
To take one politically relevant instance, the erotics of oil-centered capitalist development play an important role in the current political projects of the far right. There are particular passions that drive this agenda, weaving antitrans bigotry together with antiecological hostility, attacks on Indigenous sovereignty, and antimigrant brutality. This is not simply a rational calculation based on the profitability of intensified resource extraction, though that is certainly relevant for attaining corporate buy-in to the far right agenda. It is important to understand the far right project as an embodied politics stoking particular desires rooted in the erotics of fossil fuel-centered capitalist development.
The tools to analyze the erotic dimensions of oil-fueled capitalist development can be generated by reading Crude Capitalism and Eros and Alienation together. Crude Capitalism maps out the global dynamics of the regime of oil-centered capitalist development, but does not really explore the ways these dynamics are embodied in everyday practices of lifemaking. Meanwhile, Eros and Alienation examines the ways capitalist alienation shapes lifemaking, but does not really zoom in on the particularities of erotic formation within specific regimes of capitalist development. The intersection between these books produces something new, a set of political and economically grounded insights into the erotic dimensions of contemporary politics.
Lube
To start, as I read Crude Capitalism I was struck by the extent to which we use oil-derived products . Adam Hanieh mentions some of these uses, but does not delve into their impact in detail. I have used Vaseline in various ways throughout my life, but never thought about its origins. Petroleum jelly was an early byproduct of the oil industry, first developed in commercial form by Robert Chesebrough. He was one of the many drawn to make their fortune at the pathbreaking commercial oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859. Chesebrough noticed that oil workers used a waxy material that gummed up the flow of the oil wells to treat their scrapes and burns.3“The Crude History of Mabel’s Eyelashes,” American Oil and Gas Historical Society, accessed September 8, 2025, https://aoghs.org/products/vaseline-maybelline-history/. Within a few years, he had patented a process for producing petroleum jelly as a skin treatment.
Given its reparative, aesthetic, and sexual versatility, petroleum jelly is an example of the ways the oil industry slips into our everyday lives, extending far beyond the gas pump.
People found a wide range of uses for petroleum jelly. Combined with coal dust, it could be used as a simple form of eye makeup to darken lashes and brows. Maybelline commercialized a version of this mascara in the early twentieth century.4American Oil and Gas Historical Society, “The Crude History of Mabel’s Eyelashes.” People have also used petroleum jelly as a sexual lubricant—a usage that is not recommended, as it can weaken condoms and contribute to infections. Petroleum jelly is, however, widely available and can be bought and used without stigma. In a society where actual sexual practice is silenced and shamed in spite of the pervasive presence of sexualized imagery, people invent their own solutions. For most of the twentieth century, it was much easier to access petroleum jelly than other lubricating products, as commercial lube only became available over the counter in the 1980s, mainly due to influence of sex-positive gay male cultures.5“The Slippery History of Personal Lubricant,” Dame (blog), August 22, 2019, https://dame.com/blogs/culture/the-history-of-personal-lubricant?srsltid=AfmBOoqQ7O7Znuak_uYq9m-5n-CrPNMBj8LDSIue53eGNSQVS–U7C-H; Kim Wong-Shing, “A Brief History of Lube, From 350 BCE Onward,” Men’s Health, April 2, 2019, https://www.menshealth.com/sex-women/a27017053/history-of-lube-sex/. Given its reparative, aesthetic, and sexual versatility, petroleum jelly is an example of the ways the oil industry slips into our everyday lives, extending far beyond the gas pump.
More broadly, the widespread use of plastics has had a huge impact on our bodies and lives. Plastics derived from crude oil are everywhere, reshaping the way things are manufactured and packaged. Adam Hanieh described this as the “synthetic revolution,” in which crude oil-derived plastics and chemicals replace naturally occurring materials such as wood. The use of these more flexible synthetics provided the basis for a speedup in the process of production, reducing the labor required. This revolution in production has had important implications for our experience of our own bodies in relation to each other and the world around us.
Acceleration
The synthetic revolution has penetrated deeply into our working lives as it contributes to capitalist speedup. Since the early twentieth century, employers have increasingly founded their strategies for profitable development on acceleration through the use of oil and oil-derived products, including plastics. Capitalism is addicted to speed, and oil has lubricated this ongoing acceleration. Employers seek to increase profitability by intensifying the productivity of work, and oil-centred capitalism has provided tools for the restructuring of labor processes through the introduction of new technologies and new synthetic materials. Assemblyline mass production deployed fossil fueled mechanization to break down the process of manufacturing into a series of deskilled and repetitive tasks. This reengineering of work has drawn heavily on the deployment of highly flexible synthetic materials to simplify production processes.
The automobile was the emblematic product that rolled off the newly engineered mass production assembly line and into people’s lives beginning in the early twentieth century. The automobile, along with fossil fueled trains, ships and airplanes, contributed to accelerated circulation of people and goods. This restructuring of logistics has enhanced the pace of turnover, allowing for quicker realization of profit.
It has also reshaped our relationships with each other and our experience of our own bodies. On my way to the gym, I routinely drove over sixty miles an hour through a rural area. I grew up with cars, and so it seems unexceptional to see the world whizz by through the windshield. Yet it is only very recently in human history that we have moved so quickly through our environment, particularly in sealed and climate controlled vehicles.
My sense of the landscape is very different when I drive through it, rather than walking or otherwise moving at a more human pace powered by my own body. I race by people, birds, animals, flowers and trees without any engagement, not taking in their smells, sounds or appearances. This accelerated motion distances us from the world around us, degrading our intimacy with our surroundings and each other. Even where we end up crammed together with strangers—for example, in a subway car on the way to work—we experience distance rather than connection. People clamp hardened plastic headphones over their ears and stare at their phones to filter out those around them.
Intimacy
This loss of intimacy with the world around me as I race through the landscape in my car is not simply driven by speed; it originates with dispossession. Capitalists must seize control of the land and other key productive resources required for lifemaking to establish their command over society. The process of dispossession is not simply a legal question of waving around a deed of property ownership. People must be forcibly dislodged from a range of social and ecological relations that sustain lifemaking. The development of capitalism has required extensive use of violence through colonization, enslavement, ethnic cleansing, and enclosure to dispossess the direct producers of access to the resources for making lives. Crude Capitalism highlights the ways oil-centered capitalist development has spurred on new phases of dispossession to build the wells, pipelines and facilities required to extract, distribute, and refine oil. This ongoing process of dispossession not only creates ecological disaster through a narrow focus on extraction rather than sustainability, but also destroys the web of human relations to the land and to each other.
Our experience of our own bodies is reshaped by dispossession. People are stripped of their existing social and ecological relationships, left with nothing but their own bodies to trade in order to access the means to meet their needs. Crude Capitalism maps out, at a global scale, the role of oil-centered development in the formation of a US-led world order based on Western domination, which reached its pinnacle in the second half of the twentieth century. It does not zoom in specifically on the ways the foundational dispossession for this capitalist global order works its way into everyday experiences of lifemaking.
Sexual freedom in capitalist societies is inseparable from the compulsion to alienate one’s human capacities to gain access to the requirements for living. Members of the working class—whether employed or engaged in unpaid household labour—have no access to means of lifemaking without trading on the one thing they do own directly—their own bodies.
The process of dispossession has been structured around racial, colonial, sexual and gendered categorization, creating a hierarchy of dehumanization. For example, Indigenous peoples face a multidimensional regime of dehumanization as settler-colonial states drove them from the land and attempted to destroy their communities and cultures, shattering the web of relationships through which people sustained their lives.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson described her nation as an “ecology of intimacy” grounded in reciprocity, “a web of connections to each other, to the plant nations, the animal nations, the rivers and lakes, the cosmos and our neighbouring Indigenous nations.”6Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 8. Settler colonial capitalism set out to deliberately destroy this ecology of intimacy. The destruction of these relationships to place and community has frequently included genocidal projects to clear the land, such as the ongoing Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestine from the Nakba in 1948 to the current offensive in Gaza.
The deliberate destruction of this ecology of intimacy, estranging us from each other and our environment, leaves us individually bearing the weight of a private responsibility to keep ourselves and our dependents alive by trading on our own bodies and contributing to a social order that severs our lingering ties to a richer world. The view from a speeding car provides a perspective on the alienation from nature and each other that results from processes of capitalist dispossession.
Oil-centered capitalist development shuts down existing relations of intimacy, but at the same time fuels new expressions of desire. On the one hand, eroticism is repressed as sexuality becomes freighted with our many sided needs derived from the privatized responsibility to keep ourselves alive, so that attraction is transformed into a practical force binding life sustaining relationships that often have very little to do with the fulfillment of erotic hungers. On the other hand, desire floats free of our relationships, pumped up through the circulation of images of meticulously engineered bodies made attractive by being slathered with petroleum products.
Allure
This experience of being socially and ecologically uprooted has a dramatic impact on human erotic sensibilities, ultimately channeling the broad desire for bodily fulfillment and social connection towards the cultivation of narrowly defined sexual allure. Successive waves of dispossession undermined previously existing modes of kinship and community formation as the laboring population was driven from control over the land and other resources. This dispossession has been contested from below, as people have fought hard to sustain or rebuild communities. Antiracist, anticolonial, feminist, queer, and trans mobilizations have challenged the violence and erasure of dispossession, fighting for bodily autonomy and sexual freedom while creating new forms of sustaining relationships from below.
Sexual freedom in capitalist societies is inseparable from the compulsion to alienate one’s human capacities to gain access to the requirements for living. Members of the working class—whether employed or engaged in unpaid household labour—have no access to means of lifemaking without trading on the one thing they do own directly—their own bodies. In these conditions, sexual relations are freighted with needs and expectations that have very little to do with erotic fulfillment.
People need to build supportive relationships to make the lonely work of dispossessed lifemaking more sustainable. These relationships—whether organized around marriage, common law, or other modalities—can provide the basis for aggregating resources such as food, shelter, childcare, eldercare, and general caregiving. Such coordinated support makes living easier in the normal course of things, and can be lifesaving in an emergency. Thus, we face pressure to trade on our personal capacities, including sexual allure, to meet human needs ranging from overcoming loneliness to attaining access to food and shelter. Given the importance of these relationships in gaining access to the requirements for lifemaking, people often feel the need to invest in being attractive in order to build such relationships by appearing fit, fashionable, or alluring.
Our sense of sexual allure and how to achieve it has been profoundly influenced by oil centred capitalist development. At the simplest level, it is remarkable how many of the products we use to make us attractive contain ingredients derived from crude oil. Once you begin to look for petrolatum, mineral oil, paraffin, PEG compounds, and other ingredients listed in the Suzuki Foundation “dirty dozen” cosmetic chemicals, you begin to realize how commonly these appear in moisturizers, gels, shampoos, and cosmetics.7David Suzuki Foundation, The “Dirty Dozen” Ingredients Investigated in the David Suzuki Foundation Survey of Chemicals in Cosmetics (Toronto: The David Suzuki Foundation, 2010), available at https://davidsuzuki.org/science-learning-centre-article/backgrounder-dirty-dozen/. You may not think of crude oil as a health and beauty aid, but that is one of the many ways we use it.
Getting dressed—another important aspect of sexual allure—inaugurates a whole new level of engagement with crude oil and its derivatives. The synthetic revolution has transformed the clothing industry, vastly accelerating the inexorable movement from conception to production and from distribution to mountains of waste. Fast fashion relies heavily on synthetic materials like polyester and oil-fueled mechanization of production and logistics to deskill and cheapen labour, creating relatively affordable trendy fashion that quickly becomes dated. The end result is the massive accumulation of unbiodegradable waste, often contaminating the landfills and rivers of the Global South.8Rachel Bick, Erika Halsey, and Christine C. Ekenga, “ The Global Environmental Injustice of Fast Fashion,” Environmental Health 17, no. 1 (2018): https://doi.org/10.1186/s12940-018-0433-7. Crude gets right inside our bodies in the form of microplastics contamination, with the extent of hormonal—and thereby also erotic—disruption yet to be determined.
Mechanization
In these conditions, people feel compelled to enhance their allure by deliberately cultivating our own bodies. The acceleration inherent in capitalist relations leads us to expect ever more from human bodies—including greater speed and endurance—while meeting new aesthetic standards. In the early twentieth century, gym innovators began to apply assemblyline production techniques to physical training, breaking it down into a sequence of repetitive motions, each targeting a very narrow goal within a wider process (for example, a specific muscle group). People become their own quality engineers, setting goals and meticulously measuring outcomes. Everything is counted, and this regime of relentless quantification of inputs and outputs extends even to the point of using smart watches or phones to measure every step taken in a day. The exercise bike I use offers up an array of statistics to assess my workout at the end of my session.
…mechanical performance is particularly associated with masculine aspirations to perform sexually like a well-oiled machine. Dominant forms of masculinity have woven a mechanical sensibility in with increased performance expectations, leaving behind human vulnerability and the ever-present unrationalizable demands of caregiving.
Before mass production methods took over the gym, training consisted largely of practicing what one hoped to become good at, for example kicking a ball or skating. The line between play and working out was less definite. Athletic activity, like other forms of creative lifemaking, includes playful elements of self realization, in which hard work is paired with the satisfaction of inherent fulfillment. These playful elements get replaced by goal directed training as the means to an end that must be endured, inspired by slogans like “no pain, no gain.”
Indeed, when we work out we mimic the journey of an automobile down the assembly line, at once both the deskilled worker—doing repetitive, often painful, and mindless work—and the final product at the end of the process. This mechanical aspiration is expressed through the sexualization of automobiles, which get cast as a desirability intensifier for the driver. James Bond uses his fast car not only to escape the bad guys, but perhaps more importantly to attract women. Generally, this mechanization of desire has been specifically associated with masculinity and the driver has been presumed to be male. In Adam Ross’s novel Playworld, a husband teases his wife about the attention she received at a party from a man known for his taste for expensive cars. She replies, “A man like that…treats his cars like women and his women like cars.”9Adam Ross, Playworld (New York: Knopf Doubleday 2025), 23.
The use of mass production methods to craft ourselves as desirable—from our bodies to cosmetics, clothing, and relations—is associated with the elevation of the machine in the era of oil-centered capitalism and the degradation of the human body. Our desire gets “turned on” as it becomes mechanized, taking a term that itself acquired erotic connotations in the 1950s and 1960s, after originating in the early 1800s as the description of starting an engine by opening a valve to initiate the flow of gas.10“Turn,” OED Online, revised 2022, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/turn_v?tab=phrasal_verbs#1264862620. We get turned on like a machine, revving up to perform a particular biomechanical function, rather than defining and fulfilling our own erotic needs and attending to other’s. People often think of good sex as an engineering feat, rather than a creative process built around open-ended and widely divergent desires.
This mechanical performance is particularly associated with masculine aspirations to perform sexually like a well-oiled machine. Dominant forms of masculinity have woven a mechanical sensibility in with increased performance expectations, leaving behind human vulnerability and the ever-present unrationalizable demands of caregiving. Of course, it is really important to shine light on the detailed specifics of sexual activity, laying the foundation for safer, better and full consensual sex by overcoming silence, shame and stigma—but erotic fulfillment ought not be reducible to mechanical functioning.
This flight from the body into mechanization has been accelerated by oil-centered development, but it originates in the core social relations of capitalism. David McNally argues that members of the working class seek flight from their own bodies, which are freighted with the degradation and monotony of alienated labor.11David McNally, Bodies of Meaning: Studies on Language, Labor and Liberation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). This can take the form of physical inaction, parking ourselves on a seat to get lost in reality TV; or of concerted action, pounding our bodies into submission to transform them into image-worthy constructions. We depend on machines and screens to move us, guide us and mediate between us. We seek to mimic mechanical characteristics to recover the transformative agency that, in conditions of alienation, seems to migrate from humans to machines.12 Or indeed, in Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism, to tables. Human products seem to take on agency as they move into circulation as commodities, so that things people have made turn the tables and set the terms of access for us, for example, through market price mechanisms.
Plasticity
The route back to our humanity is not simply to shower off the oil-derived health and beauty products, unplug the exercise bike, and pivot back to nature, rejecting the artificial mechanical epoch of oil-fueled capitalism. Rather, we need to move forward to a plasticity beyond plastics.
Before the synthetic revolution, “plastic” referred to the process of crafting figures from mutable materials—like clay—that then harden. Human lifemaking always involves elements of plasticity, working on the world around us in a creative transformative process to fulfill our open-ended hungers and desires. Capitalism has intensified these elements of plasticity, but hijacked them into the service of profit. In the era of fossil capitalism, this has often taken the form of increased deployment of synthetics to speed up and deskill work.
Plastics are a double environmental threat, combining the consumption of crude oil with the creation of massive quantities of nonbiodegradable waste. We can reject plastics and at the same time celebrate plasticity, the open-endedness resulting from our deliberate and creative work on nature. People generate desires and hungers as we transform the world around us to meet our wants and needs. Gender and sexuality are not “natural” in the sense of being fixed for all time by being embedded in our genes, but dynamic because of the plasticity that characterizes human worldmaking.
As women and trans, queer, racialized, and Indigenous people have shown, the history of struggle has created certain openings for plasticity in the realms of gender and sexuality that the far right casts as unnatural. The plasticity in human making does not free us from the laws of nature, but allows us to work creatively within them to define and meet our wants and needs. As we rise against capitalism, we are seeking to free up human making, overcoming dispossession to build societies oriented around mutuality and reciprocity with each other, other species, and the environment we inhabit. We seek the power to direct our plasticity, rather than being subject to its capital-inflected dominating power.
Politics as Erotic
A key characteristic of the contemporary far right in many places is a deep hostility to our inherent plasticity and the vilification of trans lives, which they cast as “unnatural.” They combine this with a passion for fossil fuel and mineral extraction, attacking ecological measures that impede the flow of resources, or indeed the flow of traffic. At the same time, they favour violent attacks on the rights of migrants and Indigenous people. This politics is not the product of a rational calculus of measures that will strengthen the economy or improve the lives of their base of far right supporters. Important erotic dimensions drive this set of hidebound, rigid politics; understanding that will help us combat it.
The development of oil-centered capitalism changes erotic formation in ways that influence not only our intimate lives, but also our forms of political expression. The idea that desire frames political expression may seem rather strange by the standards of the generally disembodied mainstream politics of liberal democracy. Aside from standing in line to vote once every few years, the citizens of a liberal democracy generally participate in a passive and disembodied way, serving as an audience for politics as performed by a layer of professionals, elected officials, and backroom operatives.
The erotics of the far right are close-ended, seeking to return to a largely fictitious moment in the past: the supposed golden era of oil-centered capitalism, before degeneration took hold. In contrast, the erotics of mobilization and the plasticity envisioned by the revolutionary left always are necessarily open-ended.
The erotic dimensions of politics become clearer when we explore other ways of acting on the world around us. For example, the politics of revolutionary socialism are based on people putting their bodies on the line: marching, picketing, or taking other forms of direct action. In acting together, people forge erotic bonds grounded in the exhilaration of collectivity, as they contribute to the creation of a force that is both larger than themselves and capable of making history. These connections are erotic in the broad sense of the term, satisfying desires for connection and embodied fulfillment, even if not in a specifically sexual way.13Alan Sears, “Eros and Revolution” Midnight Sun. January 13, 2025, https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/eros-and-revolution/.
The far right also tends to practice forms of embodied politics that go beyond the passivity of liberal democracy. At first glance, it is easy to assume that the authoritarian right is simply antisex, as their politics are antiabortion, antiqueer, antitrans, antifeminist, anticontraception, anti-sex education, and so on. Yet there is an embodied politics to the far right that seeks to pump up and unleash passions as well. Fascism is a variant of right wing authoritarianism characterized in part by the mobilization of supporters to take violent action in the streets, attacking members of targeted groups and political opponents.14Todd Gordon and Jeffery R. Webber, “Water on the Brain: Trump 2.0 and the Crisis of Liberal Rule,” Spectre, June 24, 2025, http://doi.org/10.63478/XT55M7G4. Other versions of far right authoritarian politics that are not fully fascist generally go beyond the passive citizenship of liberal democracy, seeking to pump up supporters to take action by doxxing opponents, denouncing teachers who support queer youth, protesting “stolen” elections, or demonstrating at hotels housing migrants. The far right has mobilized supporters on the basis of an erotic sensibility grounded in the mechanization of desire in the context of oil-centered capitalist development.
One of the central themes of the far right through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been the idea that society reached its pinnacle in the past and has since been undermined by processes of degeneration. At the current moment, key elements of the far right hunger for the lofty heights of oil-centred capitalist development associated with the 1950s and early 1960s, before the “degeneration” wrought by immigration, queer rights, trans rights, feminism, children’s rights, ecology, antiracism, global shifts in production chains, and Indigenous resurgence. The far right is deeply attached to the mechanized desire that is a cornerstone of the erotics of oil-centered capitalist development.
At the heart of this erotic sensibility is the veneration of a particular racialized masculinity, cast as the beating heart of the nation. George Mosse argued such a vision of masculinity was a defining feature of fascism in the 1920s–’40s: “Never before or since the appearance of fascism was masculinity elevated to such heights: the hopes placed upon it, the importance of manliness as a national symbol and as a living example played a vital role in all fascist regimes.”15George L. Mosse, The Image of Man : The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford University Press, 1998), 154. One of the defining features of this masculinity was service to the nation, particularly in war time. It is a notable exception to the generally disembodied character of liberal democratic politics that men are disproportionately mobilized in wars to defend “democracy” and the nation. This militarization creates particular bonds between men that are celebrated by the far right and its commitment to the “warrior spirit.”
The contemporary far right seeks to revive this noble masculinity, largely identified in North America with World War II and the oil-centered capitalist world order that took shape in its aftermath. The right alleges that this order has subsequently been undermined by degeneration, to the extent that men can no longer be fully masculine—that is, can no longer fulfill their “natural” desires for heterosexual sex on their own terms, direct heterosexual households, form honorable bonds with other men, and drive freely unhindered by bike lanes or protests. Indeed contemporary men might have to cope with a female partner with the audacity to assume that she could take the wheel. To wit, the mechanization of desire has produced an identification with the automobile that goes way beyond simple transportation. The Zetkin collective powerfully analyzed this identification with the automobile: “Symbolically, affectively, and materially, the car is a ‘vehicle’ for the far right, channeling apolitical investments in the status quo into reactionary forms of anti-ecological politics. In this conjuncture, the car is a symbol of individual liberty, the nuclear family, and the ‘energy-secure’ nation.”16Zetkin Collective, “The Great Driving Right Show,” Salvage, September 23, 2024, https://salvage.zone/the-great-driving-right-show/.
This veneration of racialized masculinity does not exclude all forms of femininity. Indeed, there is a place in this political project for women in their proper sphere, as long as the boundaries of womanhood are properly policed. Sophie Lewis argued there is “a kind of Eros running through the archive of the far-right wing of women’s rights: it appears palpable to us in the pleasures people take in exercising maternalist authoritarianism, in the euphoria of the womanhood-as-suffering worldview, in the wounded attachment undergirding same-sex cis separatism.”17Sophie Lewis and Asa Seresin, “Fascist Feminism: A Dialogue,” Trans Studies Quarterly 9, no. 3 (2022): 463–79, https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-9836120.
Beyond Oil-Centered Capitalist Development
The left needs to counter this latest phase of oil-centered acceleration with a global politics of intimacy, establishing new relations of mutuality with each other, other species and the world around us through reparation, reconciliation, and remediation to address the historical social and ecological damage of dispossession, dehumanization, and extraction. One crucial dimension of this is the communization of care, “unlocking care from its restriction to the private family and transforming it into something that is collectively and democratically shared.”18M.E. O’Brien, Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (London: Pluto Press, 2023), 236–37. Weaving together the global understanding of oil-fueled capitalist development in Crude Capitalism with the focus on embodied desire in Eros and Alienation provides a particular perspective on the current political moment, mapping the integral connections between trans liberation, freedom for Palestine (as a fundamental dimension of Indigenous resurgence), and ecological sustainability.
The erotics of the far right are close-ended, seeking to return to a largely fictitious moment in the past: the supposed golden era of oil-centered capitalism, before degeneration took hold. In contrast, the erotics of mobilization and the plasticity envisioned by the revolutionary left always are necessarily open-ended. We fight to attain democratic and collective control over the key resources of society so that we can make decisions grounded in human need and ecological sustainability rather than profitability. We cannot know exactly where that will lead, as the process of making revolution and founding society anew will open up practices and ideas of human potential that go far beyond what we can currently envision.