As the climate crisis continues to unfold on a global scale, the culture industry has devoted substantial attention to it.¹ Some is in the realm of theory, in what is known as cultural studies, but much of it is in the production of cultural commodities — film, novels, television, and the like. Thus the culture industry joins much of the intellectual world in describing and, more important, seeking to analyze what may be the defining issue of our time. But insofar as culture offers an account of the phenomenon, it is worth asking what frames and concepts shape that account. Coming out of the early decades of this century, cultural theory has had a privileged position on the Left as the prism through which to understand the modern world and its predicaments. Since the prominence of cultural analysis within radical circles remains undeniable, it is important to ask how some of the leading theorists and producers of cultural analysis have approached the issue of climate crisis, especially those working within self-identified radical traditions.

The intellectual framework of cultural studies was formed under the broad umbrella of the New Left, a movement of the 1960s and ’70s that signaled a departure from Marxism while still fashioning itself as a radical program. The New Left emerged at a moment shaped by the simultaneous decline of working-class power in the Reagan–Thatcher years and the rise of vibrant social movements around race, gender, antiwar activism, and decolonization. It reflected, in its formation and effects, the contradictory pulls of liberalism and conservatism that defined the era. The dual strains of radicalism and conservatism in postcolonial thought reflect this broader cultural turn. While centralizing the analysis of colonialism and the Global South testified to the radical credentials of the discipline, postcolonial theorists needed to offer a novel critique of colonialism to distinguish it from the existing approaches. Early architects of the discipline like Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha thus attempted to fashion a radical program eschewing the centrality of Marxism and instead foregrounding the colonial experience.

The most important consequence of this turn within theory has been to displace capitalism and class with colonialism and the nation. It’s a displacement made possible, however, only by burying the history of the analysis of colonialism and imperialism within Marxist thought — a history that the foundational theorists of the discipline were very familiar with. For over a century, Marxist scholars have engaged deeply with questions of the limits of empire, the relationship of the laboring classes to the national bourgeoisie, the relationship of feudalism in the Global South with capital, and the path for socialist liberation. Within this rich lineage of writings on colonialism and the national question, these issues were not treated as sui generis but understood as shaped by class and broader social forces. Postcolonial and decolonial frameworks, however, excise class from the question of the nation, and therefore from colonialism as well. What distinguishes Marxist analyses is not inadequate attention to colonialism but an insistence on the universal logic of capital. Scholars — and not only Marxist ones — have shown, contra postcolonial and related theories, that while local conditions certainly matter, capitalism operates according to the same imperatives of accumulation and exploitation in the Global South as it does in the North.