The Eco-Marxism of Fossil Fuel Divestment at Cornell
I did not expect my first semester at Cornell to be defined by frustration at university officials. Yet, I found myself involved in a controversy that would span several months, culminating in the Cornell Board of Trustees divesting the University’s endowment from fossil fuels. I could say that the issue began when Cornell first invested in fossil fuels at a time that can’t be known due to the opaqueness of information surrounding University endowments. Or I could say that the issue began when it became commonplace for Universities to exist and have endowments in general. The Board of Trustees would likely say that “the issue” began when students from Climate Justice Cornell and other campus organizations began protesting week after week in the Spring of 2020, calling on the Board of Trustees to divest. These protests marked the start of significant pushback against the Board of Trustees’ power decades after science made it clear that fossil fuels were causing climate change. Ultimately, the Board of Trustees’ Investment Committee had actually voted to divest Cornell’s endowment from fossil fuels year before the protest movement gained momentum, with a full Board vote in 2020 merely supporting the previous decision4.Nonetheless, many protestors viewed this moment as a victory that offered desired transparency and affirmation of the campaign.
The two main groups involved in conflict were the Cornell Board of Trustees and the protestors. The Board of Trustees has the responsibility of overseeing the university and its operations on multiple fronts. This involves managing the university’s endowment, or financial investments in a variety of assets to ensure economic stability for the university’s present and future existence. The trustees themselves are a group of a few dozen powerful people. New trustees are generally chosen by existing trustees and generally have made significant financial contributions to the university. This system serves to allow a relatively small, somewhat oligarchical group to retain power over university operations. Though outsiders might like to hope that the Board of Trustees has the university’s best interests at heart and mind, a lack of accountability mechanisms like democratic elections for members can make them somewhat unresponsive to outside demands, whether they come from students, faculty, or even Cornell administrators like the President.
The divestment protestors, by comparison, were a larger group of mostly undergraduate students and some graduate students and faculty. While the Board of Trustees certainly has an air of affluence, the protestors came from more diverse backgrounds in terms of socioeconomic class and age. Many of the protestors were not operating under any official roles, joining the larger cause because they agreed with its goals. Still, some of the protestors were elected to leadership positions in clubs and organizations such as Climate Justice Cornell, other activist groups at Cornell and in Ithaca, and identity-based student groups like La Associación Latina. These groups vary in terms of their leadership structures, though I can say from experience that Climate Justice Cornell operated through democratic elections for leadership positions and a horizontal structure that allowed for some amount of equal power sharing within the organization while allowing elected leaders to facilitate certain protest efforts. While the Cornell Trustees have many duties and responsibilities, the divestment protestors were united for one sole effort: fossil fuel divestment.
The central conflict between the protestors and the Board of Trustees over whether Cornell should divest its endowment from fossil fuels was in a way a manifestation of Eco-Marxism. Eco-Marxism can mean many things, but for my purposes, I will broadly define it as conflict surrounding class and the environment. Eco-Marxism largely stems from Marx’s theory of the Metabolic Rift, or the idea that the exploitation of labor inherently degrades the environment, necessitating an uprising1. Though Marx originally described the Metabolic Rift in the context of land use, the same concept in the context of climate change could entail the exploitation of labor being the continued burning of fossil fuels and emissions of greenhouse gasses that result from labor. Meanwhile, the “necessitated uprising” could come from all of the harms and natural disasters that climate change is causing and will continue to cause such as wildfires and rising sea levels. John Bellamy Foster analyses Marx and the metabolic rift in the context of climate change, summing up the core problem as “The Great Capitalist Climacteric”. He comes to six main conclusions about a necessary revolution: that monopoly-finance capital specifically and not general economic growth is threatening the global environment, that capitalism is suffering from an economic and environmental epochal crisis, that halting economic growth of rich countries would require a vast redistribution system, that socialism exists as a model of sustainable human development, that revolutionary change can only occur through human agency, and that a such a revolutionary struggle will need to occur in two phases of an immediate eco-democratic phase and a decisive eco-socialist phase2. I will use mainly Foster’s prescriptive framework as it relates to eco-Marxism and climate change to analyze the divestment protests, which aimed to mitigate climate change. This integration will show that the divestment protests contain some elements of eco-Marxism but are more complicated than Foster’s revolutionary narrative.
First, it is helpful to discuss the ways in which the Cornell divestment movement did embody eco-Marxism. The most obvious of these is the harm of what Foster describes as “monopoly-finance capital”. Universities are not monopolies per se: there are many of them, both private and public. But the monopolistic element comes in the form of entities working together with common tactics for common goals, such as shaping the state and public policy. The finance element of Cornell’s endowment is more readily apparent as the endowment is a direct form of investment in companies like those that produce fossil fuels. Fossil fuel corporations would not be able to operate in the same capacity that they do now without investments from outside sources to buoy them. Foster’s described problem of monopoly-finance capital threatening the global environment is therefore certainly evident in the problem of Cornell’s endowment being invested in fossil fuel companies that are destroying the planet through climate change. Beyond alignment of the main problem, there is a core link between some of the ethos of eco-Marxism and the ethos of the divestment campaign. The goal of the campaign, to weaken the fossil fuel industry for the sake of ameliorating climate change does entail viewing humans and nature as intertwined which is the prescribed way of fixing the Metabolic Rift3. Shifting away from fossil fuels requires an acknowledgement that humans are the cause of significant ecological problems. In the University’s case, divestment would be the greatest form of this acknowledgement. The final significant way that the divestment campaign aligns with Foster’s descriptions has to do with the human agency on the part of the protestors. This agency mainly was not derived from individuals exercising power from explicitly powerful positions, but rather, from a large collective united by a common goal. This leads into Foster’s last, and in my opinion, most important description of eco-Marxist fixes for the climate crisis as they relate to the divestment campaign: the revolutionary struggle of immediate eco-democracy and decisive eco-socialism.
Foster describes the eco-democratic phase as carrying out radical reforms that go against the logic of capital, spearheaded by a broad alliance of all of humanity outside of the ruling class2. In some ways, both of these conditions are not necessarily met by the divestment protests. Paradoxically, the Board of Trustees’ reasoning for divesting the endowment, beyond the pressure of the protests, may not have been because of fears of the climate crisis directly. Rather, it could have fit into a broader trend of divestment from fossil fuels in America that are logically based on the fear of government regulation and state influence over the fossil fuel industry that would render investments in the industry unstable in the future. While it made sense for the protestors to focus their target on Cornell University for the sake of convenience, the result was parallel yet mismatched pressures on the University from protestors and the government. The fact that the Board of Trustees secretly divested from fossil fuels years before the protests gained momentum is evidence that the pressure of the state was what proved most influential. Divestment did require anti-capitalist reforms, or at least the reasonable expectation of such reforms. But those reforms happened or were expected to happen at the government level which the divestment protestors mostly attempted to eschew.
Foster’s second condition for eco-democracy, the broad alliance, was in some ways formed by the protestors but in some ways was still incomplete. First, I will describe the main aspect of the protestors that were more evident of a broad alliance: the fact that the protests were largely intersectional in nature. They included demonstrations and teach-ins with focuses on racial justice and migrant justice for example. That intersectionality helped attract and retain the support of identity-based student groups which contributed to overall protest numbers and campaign strategy. The air of environmental justice or climate justice that ran throughout the divestment protest campaign is itself one of what Foster describes as radical reform measures indicative of the eco-democratic phase, though there is a distinction between an explicit environmental justice-targeted action and a climate reform that will help achieve justice due to the nature of how climate change inherently places disproportionate impacts on certain disadvantaged groups like people of color and low-income people2.
Still, there are a few elements of the makeup of the protestors and how they operated that made them fall short of being considered a broad alliance. In fact, the presence of conflict between the protestors and some of non-protesting students and faculty members quite significantly complicates the narrative of class unity. Students complained when protestors blocked roads, preventing cars and busses from getting through and disrupting the daily lives of students and other commuters. University groundworkers were also left to clean up streamers and other messes that littered the Ithaca campus’s trees and roads from the protests. While these disruptions were intended to get the attention of the Board of Trustees, they ended up having an outsized impact on the lives of others who were powerless to influence the University’s endowment. This turned some students against the entire movement, even if they were sympathetic towards its goals. Beyond those working-class students and campus workers who were explicitly against the movement, there was little effort to reach out to some groups that were more ambivalent. University groundworkers, service workers, and other similar groups did not meaningfully take part in the protests. Though students and professors still constitute a working class due to their lack of capital power, there is a distinction between them and Ithaca-based service workers that may have lower incomes or class mobility potential by comparison. Additionally, while Cornell’s endowment is unified for the Ithaca campus, New York City campuses, and even the Qatar-based campus, no effort was made by the protest organizers to reach out to groups outside of Ithaca. One protest tactic, an attempted negligence lawsuit against Cornell for recklessly investing in corporations that, through climate change, would cause harm to its own campuses, did directly reference New York City for its flooding risk and Qatar for the risks of increasing temperatures. Yet, despite the lip-service paid to these campuses, more effort could have been made to reach out to them to learn of the opinions of other working-class Cornell affiliates.
Now that I have analyzed the “broad alliance” and “anti-capitalist reforms” of the immediate eco-democratic phase in relation to the divestment protests, that leaves the question: what about the decisive eco-socialist phase? Examining post-divestment Cornell and Ithaca may help give some answers. In the wake of the global Covid-19 pandemic and national Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, many of the divestment protestors turned their attention to what they viewed as other worthy causes unrelated to climate justice directly, leading to the formation of new activist groups like the Cornell Abolitionist Revolutionary Society, which now remains inactive. Climate Justice Cornell turned its attention mostly to local and state political initiatives like the New York Renews campaign which advocates for progressive state climate laws, though activist organizing proved difficult under the pandemic’s health restraints. Climate Justice Cornell and other campus-based sustainability groups continue to promote awareness and action around climate change, but no activist efforts have attempted to match the scale or tone of the divestment protests. Most importantly however, no campaigns since fossil fuel divestment have targeted the University’s endowment for other injustices that it may be invested in. Fossil fuels aren’t the only industry Cornell could be invested in that students and faculty would likely pin as unethical. Furthermore, there are no significant efforts being made to rectify the governance system that allowed Cornell to invest its endowment in fossil fuels for so long in the first place. Cornell is certainly many steps away from decisive eco-socialism.
The lens of Foster’s interpretation of eco-Marxism in light of climate change is a helpful one for viewing most of the points of conflict that were present in the Cornell endowment divestment movement. The main alignments between Foster and the protests have to do with the problem of monopoly-finance capital worsening climate change and the intersectionality of the protest movement. The main points of division are that divestment does not represent an anti-capitalist logic, that there was a lack of a true broad alliance carrying out the democratic protests, and that there was no meaningful attempt to form an eco-socialist movement following divestment. The successes of the movement do raise a question for Foster’s perspective and how fitting it is for smaller scale movements. Global mobilization is required to tackle the global problem of climate change, yet the divestment protests proved that smaller-scale local nuances are at play when it comes to helpful piecemeal actions. Meanwhile, Foster’s framework still makes me feel like the divestment protests could have been even more successful if they made a few realistic changes like broadening the alliance/coalition. The tension between Foster and the divestment protests also raises a much broader question of if actions at a medium scale like a university are even helpful. Eco-socialism may not be a realistic goal for a university, but I believe that eco-democratic changes like divestment and other sustainability initiatives can be made to make an impact. Ultimately, the story of the divestment movement is overall one of class, power, and identity conflict that ended with a decision that will not shock capitalism to its core but will certainly impact climate change and the state of the world.
Works Cited
1. Foster, John Bellamy. 1999. “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology.” American Journal of Sociology105(2):366–405. doi: 10.1086/210315Links to an external site.
2. Foster, John Bellamy. 2015. “The Great Capitalist Climacteric: Marxism and “System Change Not Climate Change”.” Monthly Review, 11, 1–18. doi:https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-067-06-2015-10_1. https://www.proquest.com/magazines/great-capitalist-climacteric-marxism-system/docview/1734309835/se-2.
3. Schneider, Mindi, and Philip McMichael. 2010. “Deepening, and Repairing, the Metabolic Rift.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 37(3):461–84. doi: 10.1080/03066150.2010.494371Links to an external site.
4. Dean, J. (2020, May 22). Cornell announces moratorium on fossil fuel investments. Cornell Chronicle. https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2020/05/cornell-announces-moratorium-fossil-fuel-investments
