Green Capitalism: A Conversation with Thea Riofrancos

In her 2025 book Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, Thea Riofrancos follows lithium from the salt flats of Chile to policy debates in Washington and Brussels, showing how corporate rationalities, industrial policy, geopolitics and class conflict are reshaping the material foundations of capitalism. Lithium is here an entry point to analyze green capitalism as a contested (geo)political and economic project, marked by contradictions, trade-offs, and new forms of conflict. In this conversation, we discussed the dilemmas the energy transition poses for the left, the changing geographies of extraction, the non-linear temporalities of decarbonization, and the prospects for internationalist solidarities along emerging supply chains.

This interview was conducted online in April 2025. A translated version was published in a special issue of Hungarian political economy journal “Fordulat” on the Global Political Economy of Lithium Batteries.

Bernardo Oyarzún, Eco Sistema, 2005. Photo: Fernando Balmaceda.

Tracking Lithium To Understand Green Capitalism

David Karas: Can you talk about the genesis of your latest book and how it fits with your previous work? Why did you choose lithium to explore green capitalism?

Thea Riofrancos: There’s a combination of longstanding interests and some serendipity in how I arrived at lithium specifically.

The throughline is that I had been working since around 2010—during graduate school—on the political economy of extractive sectors in Latin America. I was interested in why these sectors are so contentious: how they expose global inequalities, but also how they inspire radical movements and ambitious policy visions by Global South governments. These sectors reveal a lot about world history and engage directly with nature and ecology. They show, in a particularly visible way, how capitalism and nature relate to one another.

My first book focused on the contentious politics of large-scale mining and oil extraction in Ecuador. I analyzed different visions of these sectors on the left: contrasting a more anti-extractivist, militant opposition to oil and mining, with a resource-nationalist position—where the state or the people should own and benefit from extraction, but not necessarily oppose it on environmental grounds. That was the basis for Resource Radicals, the book that emerged from that fieldwork.

As time went on into the late-2010s, I became deeply involved in U.S. politics surrounding the energy sector and the idea of a Just Energy Transition. I was active in the Democratic Socialists of America and engaged in efforts to articulate what an eco-socialist edge of the Green New Deal could mean, and how it would be enacted.

That was when I began reflecting more critically about the ecological and social impact of the energy transition. Here I was, advocating for urgent climate action—specifically a rapid, holistic energy transition that would improve the wellbeing of workers and marginalized communities, and where those groups would also be political protagonists. I was doing that in the US context: That’s where I live, that’s where I do my organizing work - but with my background in researching the political economy of extraction, I started to think through these conflicts over solar farms or transmission lines in analogy with conflicts over mining, even though these sectors and the phases of the energy transition are different.

At a party, a friend asked, “What do you think about lithium?” And I said, “I don’t know” because I hadn’t yet extended my thinking to the mining side of the energy transition.

And so I started digging around – no pun intended. I started looking into lithium and saw an opportunity to explore a convergence of themes I was already passionate about: Latin America—particularly Chile, which is the world’s second-largest lithium producer—the energy transition, mining, and the dynamics of social movements around extraction that felt familiar from my past work. I had a little time off from teaching with an opportunity to do some fieldwork, and so I decided to just go for it.

That was the genesis of the project. My first real attempt to understand energy transition supply chains—beginning with lithium in Chile—started in early 2019. At the same time, I was co-writing a book on the Green New Deal entitled A Planet to Win.

Looking back, I’m relieved that the analysis I wrote then wasn’t fundamentally misguided. I was doing ethnographic research and analytical writing simultaneously. My method relies on building trust, particularly with activists […] I was committed to not writing something that would circulate in the Global North and misrepresent what was happening on the ground.

From the very beginning of my fieldwork in Chile, I was grappling with this dual challenge: how was I going to do justice to the complexity of these issues I was just learning about, while I also wanted to urgently inject these topics into public debates in the U.S. and Europe where our book would probably be more widely read.

I wanted to highlight the injustices and ecological harms of mining—but also show alternative, progressive visions for how mining and supply chains could be governed […]

While the geographies and sectors have changed——Resource Radicals focused on Ecuador, this book spans Chile and the Global North—the core thread running through all my work is an engagement with extraction. But more than that, all my projects take on difficult questions for the left.

In Resource Radicals, the central dilemma was the tension Global South movements and governments face when trying to transform extractive sectors: how challenging that process is, how many trade-offs are involved, and the divide on the left between anti-extractivism and resource nationalism.

In A Planet to Win and even more so in Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, the dilemma shifts. The key question becomes: how should the left, in different geographic contexts, grapple with the fact that the energy transition requires mining—at least in the short term?

That’s a real contradiction. It can feel like an oxymoron—how can we do this damage to the Earth in the name of saving it? And layered on top are geopolitical tensions, supply chain politics, industrial strategies, labor issues. I’m drawn to these difficult, often contradictory spaces where the left needs to confront reality, rather than ignore it or reduce it to simple binaries.

Defining Green Capitalism

David Karas: You follow lithium to explore what you call the extractive frontiers of green capitalism. But before we get to those frontiers, let’s unpack the concept of green capitalism. Could you give a first working definition of what it is and what it isn’t for you?

Thea Riofrancos: Thanks for framing it that way, because I think understanding what I don’t mean by green capitalism is as important as the ways I use the term. […]

I’m not claiming that no one has come up with a great definition—I haven’t read everything—but in the spaces I inhabit, two dominant definitions stand out. And I don’t find either adequate to the analytic task, though for different reasons.

The first is a normative, even optimistic definition. It’s the belief that capitalism can be green, and that it can green itself through market-based mechanisms: innovation, competition, and the efficient allocation of resources. In this view, because society has recognized the importance of climate change, markets will respond accordingly. Policymakers might “nudge” things along, but ultimately, markets will innovate and deliver green solutions. The extreme version of this belief is what we might call eco-modernism: the idea that capitalism can internalize its externalities and “decouple” growth from environmental degradation.

The second definition is the opposite: that green capitalism is simply greenwashing. This perspective assumes that capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with ecological sustainability. It may go further and suggest that capitalism, as a system, cannot even exist without fossil fuels. Think of Andreas Malm’s work—though I want to be careful not to oversimplify his argument, but I want to flag his work as a critical intervention that shows the intimate links between fossil fuels and capitalism. From that perspective, green capitalism is a contradiction in terms.

Of these two, the second has more critical value, but I still don’t find it sufficient because neither of these approaches helps us construct a grounded, materialist analysis. They don’t guide us to the empirical and observable processes shaping the present.

So I took a different approach. I define green capitalism as the set of economic sectors, investments, and supply chains that are labeled green by someone. That “someone” could be corporations, regulatory bodies like the EU, certification agencies, or even scientific experts or academics. The key point is that some authority deems these activities to be part of the solution to climate change—whether through mitigation, like decarbonization, or adaptation.

This allows me to include a wide spectrum—from lithium-ion batteries to speculative technologies like carbon capture. My goal isn’t to evaluate validity of these technologies upfront, but to analyze the political economy surrounding them.

In other words, I’m not saying green capitalism is normatively good, or that it will make our economic system more sustainable. But I also reject the idea that there are literally no commercialized technologies which could address the climate crisis. Solar panels are real. Under different regimes of accumulation and ownership, they could help address the climate crisis if we were actually leaving fossil fuels in the ground and transitioning to zero emissions energy completely.

What I want to do is map out the material processes involved, the actors driving them, and the political and economic struggles that surround them.

I focused a lot on the economic aspect of my definition of green capitalism, these observable economic activities and physical processes, especially when we look at mining or solar panels – but as I point out in the book, it’s also a political project, and one that is actually quite precarious .

Sometimes critics imagine green capitalism as an all powerful nemesis, which is functioning perfectly and hegemonically. Green capitalists are profiteering, they’re getting away with it, we are all suffering, and we don’t really have a real energy transition… and there’s a kernel of truth to each of those statements, right?

But in reality, green capitalism is also a political project because these investments and sectors are largely dependent on state support. That’s in part because green sectors are riddled with financial and technical problems to fully deploy. And more broadly, it’s hard to imagine an intentional transformation of the energetic and material substrate of the economy without state intervention, given the power of incumbent firms and even the weight of sunk costs in the existing system. Dependency on the state introduces a level of vulnerability for green capitalism. Politics is is a domain of competing forces and projects, which means that state-dependent green capitalism will be politically contested and vulnerable to counter-movements—both right and left.

For these reasons, I think it’s important to pay attention to the political justifications of green capitalism.The ideological pitch is that markets will lead innovation. The state should help, it should subsidize. Business friendly policies are best. Capitalism can solve the problem - these are political statements that are made by political supporters of green capitalism, but in practice, green capitalism is fundamentally dependent on the policy environment and on the political conjunctures in which it takes root.

Geographies of Green Capitalism

David Karas: Let’s talk about the geographic dimension of green capitalism. You describe similar political conflicts around lithium mining taking place in very different locations: Chile, the U.S., and Portugal. What does green capitalism do to existing core–periphery dynamics in global capitalism?

Thea Riofrancos: I know there’s a lot of interest in the geography of capitalism in Hungary—and it makes sense. Hungary has this semi-peripheral position in Europe and in global supply chains. It also acts as a kind of mediator between East and West, North and South and I think it’s a very interesting location from which to ask this question

Let me start by saying: on its own, green capitalism doesn’t fundamentally change global North-South relations. A lot of what we’re seeing follows long-standing patterns, but there are important caveats. One is China. The rise of China complicates any simple global North–South binary. It’s not a core country in the traditional sense, nor is it part of the periphery. It’s a major actor in making green capitalism possible at all.

Putting China aside for a moment—analytically, if not politically—what we see is that green capitalism runs in the grooves of the longue durée of capitalism. The intellectual property, the R&D, and high-tech manufacturing stay concentrated in a few core regions. Meanwhile, the extractive activities—mining lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite—are disproportionately located in Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia like Indonesia. So in that sense, not much has changed.

This is why some people refer to the current moment as green colonialism or green neocolonialism. And there’s truth to that. Mining projects in the Global South are often the dirtiest, most contentious parts of the supply chain. They’re happening in places with long histories of colonial extraction. So yes, green capitalism reproduces those dynamics.

But—and this is important—we’re also seeing something new. Because of the way that green industrial policy has become entangled with national security and geopolitical competition, policymakers in the global North are increasingly interested in onshoring parts of the supply chain.

And not just manufacturing or R&D—they also want to onshore mining itself. That’s a shift. In the U.S., for example, we’re seeing efforts to revive domestic mining in places that haven’t had major extractive sectors in decades. In Europe, too, there’s interest in lithium mining in Portugal, in Germany, in France, and potentially in other places. There’s a recently discovered huge rare-earth deposit in Sweden.

This means that marginalized communities in the global North—especially Indigenous communities, but also other land-dependent peoples like small-scale farmers—are now confronting some of the same extractive pressures that we’ve long seen in the global South. In Nevada, for instance, lithium mines are being proposed on sacred Indigenous land. In Sweden, Sami communities are facing similar threats. And in Chile, of course, Indigenous land is again at the center of extraction.

So we’re seeing a convergence of experiences: communities in different parts of the world facing similar conflicts over land, sovereignty, and environmental degradation. In activist gatherings—both virtual and in person—I’ve witnessed people from these different geographies almost mirror each other’s experiences.

At the same time, I don’t want to discard the North–South distinction. It still has empirical and political relevance. There are historical reasons why people have organized around that binary—dependency theory, Third Worldism, structuralist economics. It continues to explain a lot about how global capitalism functions. But I also think we need to be open to seeing how the geography of capitalism is changing in this moment while that change is always situated atop historical accumulation of vast inequality globally.

Temporalities of Green Capitalism

David Karas: I really liked the way you framed the temporalities of these processes on page 29 where you describe a sort of eureka moment when you realized that “everything would happen at once”. Could you elaborate a bit on how you see the temporalities of the climate crisis, green capitalism, and the energy transition unfolding?

Thea Riofrancos: I think there are two different but related ways to approach this, and I’ll quickly lay them out before elaborating further.

The first is exactly what you just said: the lived, almost phenomenological experience of the energy transition — how we, as humans, corporations, governments, or activists, actually live through this moment. That’s the passage you’re referring to.

The second is more about historicity — about how, in this moment, we’re seeing resonances across different historical periods. Certain genres of political action, policymaking, or economic strategy are being revived and reanimated — but also changed in the process.

It feels like we’re living in the 2020s, but also in the 1970s, and at times even in the era of classical imperialism in the early 20th century. It’s as if multiple historical moments are being layered on top of one another — or, better yet, that the past is being reanimated in ways that make it present again. That’s a different register of temporality, but both were very present for me while writing the book.

The multiplex temporality makes analysis really challenging.

Because as analysts, we’re often drawn to linearity. We want to establish causality. Even the most rigorous forms of institutional theory — with their process tracing or models of endogenous change — tend to assume a sequence: one thing happens, then another, then another. But that’s not how I experienced the flow or structure of time in my ethnographic fieldwork.

It felt like everything was happening at once. I had to find ways to impose order — to make analytic sense of the simultaneity — while also, at times, just letting that simultaneity wash over me without trying to resolve it.

On the historical side, I also had to be careful. There’s resonance, there’s rhyming, there’s riffing — but I had to be really clear that there’s no such thing as repetition in history, because a lot of loose and imprecise historical analogies have also been circulating.

And maybe just one more thing, to return to the passage you mentioned. And this is something you and your colleagues have reflected on as well: the very word “transition” carries a linear thrust. It implies movement from point A to point B, with some process in between that pushes you forward. Even if it’s not perfectly smooth — maybe it’s two steps forward, one step back — there’s still an implied directionality.

But I think what we’re seeing challenges that. Transitions may not be linear, even if the end point is different from the starting one.

There are a few reasons for that, but one of the most obvious is this: we are not, for the most part, leaving fossil fuels in the ground. Yes, there are exceptions. But overwhelmingly, what we’re doing is adding to the energy mix. We’re adding renewable infrastructure on top of fossil fuel infrastructure. And the same goes for extraction — we’re not replacing one kind of extraction with another. We’re expanding the overall extractive frontier.

And I really hope this changes in my lifetime. I say that sincerely. But from where we are right now, we cannot confidently say that we’re transitioning away from fossil fuels. I hope we will. But that uncertainty already casts doubt on the idea of a linear transition.

What we can say with certainty is that many things are happening simultaneously. We have the climate crisis, intensifying year after year. We have the physical deployment of renewable technologies and their supply chains. We have expanded mining for lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite. We also have continued extraction of fossil fuels — coal, oil, gas.

And alongside that, in some places, we see climate adaptation policies or improvements in resilience. But overall, the crisis is worsening. These things seem contradictory — and they are — yet they’re happening at the same time.

As Marxists, we’re relatively comfortable with contradiction. We accept that reality can be composed of opposing tendencies. But even then, we need to unpack what that contradiction actually entails.

Because “transition,” in ordinary speech, still implies a clear direction. And what feels striking about this moment is how difficult it is to identify such a direction. What we can certainly say is that there are more elements happening at once than in the prior kind of energy system that was maybe more purely fossil fuel based.

(Geo)Politics of Green Capitalism

David Karas: You describe a plurality of public and private actors who intervene and compete not only in the extraction of lithium but also in its valuation and pricing. What do the conflicts between states, mining companies, commodity traders, battery makers, electric vehicle manufacturers, and so on - reveal about the power relations between the state and different capitalist groups in the age of green capitalism? How would you characterize the synergies and tensions among these actors?

Thea Riofrancos: I should say from the outset that a lot of this is context-dependent — especially when it comes to how policymakers interact with corporate or investor actors. But it also varies across the private sector itself, in terms of how firms engage with investors, suppliers, and the broader ecosystem of economic actors.

To bring in China right away: its political economy of lithium, battery supply chains, and EV production is quite unique. I’m happy to say more about it — it’s not my main area, but I’ve had to learn a lot, given China’s dominant position.

But for now, most of what I’ll say applies more directly to the Global North. I’ll bring Chile in later too. I just want to be clear about the geographic contours, because there are real differences across contexts.

So, first, to pick up where we left off earlier: there’s the nexus between policymakers and economic actors. As we discussed, public subsidies are essential at every stage of the supply chain — sometimes taking the form of direct investments or equity stakes, but more often cheap loans, grants, and tax credits. The state subsidizes innovation and lets firms capitalize on it. In both Europe and the U.S., this approach has been indispensable. These supply chains simply wouldn’t get off the ground without state involvement.

In both regions, what we see is what scholars like Daniela Gabor and Benjamin Braun have called a “de-risking” approach — a carrot rather than a stick model. Tim Sahay, whom I quote in the book, calls it “bottomless mimosas” — referring specifically to the U.S. model of endless tax credits that firms can tap into.

So, we see a sort of positive nudging on the part of state actors and this is very consequential, because, if we take Brett Christophers’ work seriously, we know that many green sectors are precarious in terms of profitability. In The Price is Wrong, he focuses on renewable-generated electricity, but he’s also written about extractive industries, which is my focus. While the profit dynamics differ between extraction and electricity generation, there’s still an underlying precarity that makes state involvement essential.

This leads me to a second point: in the extractive sector specifically, I’ve observed a deep tension between finance and extraction.

This is where I’ve seen the sharpest fissures between different fractions of capital — especially in the Global North. The financial sector today is highly short-termist. We’ve had multiple waves of shareholder revolutions over the past few decades, and we’re now at a point where shareholders expect extremely fast and high returns. They also feel entitled to those returns — as if dividends and buybacks should take priority over long-term productive investments.

It’s a strange inversion. And I’m not saying this to express sympathy for capitalists — that’s not the point. But I think it’s important to recognize that mining companies have struggled to raise capital for exploration and development because their investors demand immediate profits. This dynamic really solidified about a decade ago, after the crash of the early-2000s commodity boom. That crash left a kind of trauma — a hangover, as some executives put it — and now mining firms must work hard to prove to shareholders that they will deliver dividends and profitability, often at the expense of long-term investment.

That’s a serious limitation when you’re dealing with projects that may take 10 to 30 years to develop. Those time horizons are simply incompatible with current financial expectations.

This is why it’s important to highlight that China’s financial system functions differently. I won’t go into too much detail, but the existence of political directives and constraints around capital flows enables Chinese firms — even private ones — to plan over much longer time horizons. That’s critical for extractive industries and for building out supply chains. Western firms, even when they want to plan long-term, are constrained by their financial structures.

So, the tension between finance and extraction is very real. But I also saw ways actors are trying to mitigate those tensions. And that’s where your point about green finance and certification becomes important.

Mechanisms like green mining certifications, price premiums for “sustainable” lithium, and green bonds are all ways to make extractive sectors more appealing to investors. They help create distinctions among mining firms — those that can brand themselves as green or ethical are more likely to attract capital and offtake agreements.

Just yesterday, for instance, the London Metals Exchange announced it’s creating a separate exchange for green critical minerals, including lithium. That’s directly tied to this push for certification schemes. Firms want to be labeled as green, ethical, or sustainable, and those labels can be parlayed into price premiums or favorable bond terms. Some investors are even willing to take a haircut on returns if they believe they’re supporting an environmentally responsible project.

Now, we might expect this to collapse under political pressure — especially in the U.S., where Republicans have attacked ESG investing, and in the EU, where firms are lobbying to water down green criteria. But even so, these mechanisms persist. They’re ways for Western mining companies to gain a competitive edge — to attract finance, secure offtake deals, and curry favor with downstream buyers.

And green credentials are just one part of it. Geographic location has become another key factor. In this era of geopolitical restructuring and onshoring, where a project is located can determine how much government support it gets. That support, in turn, helps derisk the project financially — smoothing over some of the tensions between finance and extraction.

Often, this smoothing happens because the state steps in with loans or subsidies, providing a financial backstop that makes private financiers more comfortable investing. It’s all interconnected — but it’s a connection built across very real fissures and tensions.

As leftists, I think it’s important not to romanticize green capitalism or assume it’s always a savvy, hyper-profitable machine. The reality is more contradictory and fragile.

And that fragility also reveals openings. If we identify these points of tension — between finance and extraction, or between state support and private return — we can begin to imagine and advocate for alternative models: socialized finance, public ownership, or long-term planning that actually serves ecological and social goals, because, the current private-led model isn’t working very well — even on its own terms.

Contested Distributive Outcomes

David Karas: The central dilemma your book addresses is the contradiction between, on one hand, the material need for more mining to confront the climate crisis, and on the other, the environmental and social costs of mining concentrated in extractive frontiers. At the same time, you expressed dissatisfaction with the way this is often framed as a zero-sum trade-off. Can you talk a bit about how your thinking on this has evolved? What are some more productive ways of approaching this contradiction, especially from a politically engaged perspective?

Thea Riofrancos: Yes, it’s a really good and also complex question. I think whether or not there’s a zero-sum conflict between the goals of climate action and the protection of environmental and Indigenous rights depends in part on the scale of analysis.

At the level of a specific landscape or mining project, the tensions are often quite real and may be zero-sum. You can either have a mine or an unpolluted river. You can either have a mine or maintain agricultural livelihoods. You can have a mine or preserve access to ceremonial or sacred sites. This isn’t just a philosophical claim — it’s an empirical one. Mines are large, physically intrusive, and they cause irreversible environmental change.

Take mining waste, for instance — the sheer volume of rock and material that’s dug up and left behind. This is getting worse in sectors like copper, where the highest-quality deposits have already been mined. What remains are lower-grade ores that require moving vastly more material to extract the same amount of metal. That means more waste, and that waste doesn’t disappear. At best, it can be safely stored, but often it leaks or contaminates.

So, at the local level, mining is often in direct conflict with other land uses, values, and forms of life. That’s why community opposition — when it arises — can be militant. People often see these conflicts as existential. That’s not to say that you can’t have better regulated mines. You can. That’s something I advocate for. There’s better and worse, but even with better regulation, all mining causes irreversible landscape transformation.

But when we zoom out — to the planetary scale, or the system of capitalism as a whole — we have a lot more room to maneuver. If we break out mentally from the strictures of the current status quo, we can imagine a much broader range of options.

And this doesn’t necessarily involve a full ecosocialist utopia, just common sense. Even relatively modest reforms — particularly in the U.S., which isn’t exactly known for pragmatic land use or transportation policy — could make a huge difference. Many capitalist societies in Europe and Asia already have sensible policies around density, mass transit, and cycling infrastructure. Implementing those policies in the U.S. would reduce the material intensity of the energy transition.

If we had more public transit, denser cities, and more efficient transportation systems, we would need significantly less mining. Yet, climate models and material flow forecasts often assume a business-as-usual scenario — which is that, to get zero emissions, we have to mine the Earth five times over.

These models rarely ask: “What if more people took buses?” or “What if we prioritized battery recycling?” or “What if we used regulation or incentives to limit battery size instead of encouraging ever-larger EVs?”

In China, for example, there’s been an intentional effort to get more range from material-efficient batteries. That’s not necessarily for environmental reasons — it’s about material security. The Chinese government wants to reduce reliance on mining, which is politically and economically risky.

And that logic makes sense: even if you’re not motivated by environmental justice, it’s still rational to seek a less extractive path. And if you add up all of these relatively modest changes — better transit, smaller batteries, recycling — you get a version of the energy transition that is not only less resource-intensive but could also get to zero emissions more quickly. The faster we get people out of cars, the more we densify our cities, the less mining we do… that actually gets us to our climate goals faster.

We, in the U.S. are on the slowest route, to the “energy transition” because it’s all about these one-to-one replacements of existing technologies with quite similar technologies, which doesn’t at all get at the question of how we deal with the polluting technologies, not just encouraging people to buy EVs, but how do we actually get the traditional cars off the road?

The dominant model in the U.S. is extremely slow. It relies on individuals buying new EVs and upgrading their homes with solar panels. That’s an enormous coordination problem across millions of households, and it’s not equitably distributed. EVs are expensive, and subsidies don’t go far enough to overcome income differences.

Meanwhile, China is using a mix of sticks and carrots to shape consumer behavior in a different way that we’re not comfortable, seemingly, with doing in, in the U.S.

In contrast, the U.S. model relies on individuals purchasing expensive new assets with limited subsidies. That approach is slow, fragmented, and deeply unequal.

So, to summarize: if we had more public planning and coordination — more public provisioning of mobility and energy — we could reduce the material intensity of the transition, speed it up, and make it more equitable. That doesn’t eliminate the tensions or trade-offs, especially at the local level, but it does reframe them.

It allows us to align the interests of Indigenous communities with those of working-class constituencies elsewhere in the supply chain. Because if we go down the high-resource, high-profit path, those groups are often placed in conflict. But if we pursue a more collectively organized, lower-intensity pathway, their interests begin to align — around a faster, fairer, and less extractive transition. It is the high resource-intensive, profit-oriented transition that divides the working class globally, and also leads to the worst environmental and climate outcomes.

Solidarities and Struggles under Green Capitalism

David Karas: What opportunities and constraints do you see for transnational solidarities and emancipatory movements to emerge along lithium or other supply chains in the context of green capitalism?

Thea Riofrancos: I think it’s a fascinating moment — even more so now than when I finished writing the book — to ask questions about internationalism and solidarity, both across borders and within national geographies. Even within a single country, say Chile, what does it take for Indigenous communities in the Atacama to build alliances with working-class communities in Santiago? Because those alliances have happened.

Understanding how organizing can cut through damaging divides — rural-urban, worker-Indigenous, environmentalist-worker — is crucial. These divides are often imposed or reinforced from above. Latin America, where much of my early research was inspired, offers powerful examples of how coalitions and left-wing political projects can bring people out of their silos and connect them.

It’s also productive to think about the supply chain itself as a site of organizing - how we connect our struggles to one another across those different nodes in supply chains within a country or across borders.

Now, zooming out to the international level — which is how you framed the question — we’re in a moment of intensifying conflict among global elites. Not always hot wars, though in some cases that’s true, but certainly geopolitical rivalries, trade wars, economic sanctions, moves and countermoves. Most visibly between the U.S. and China, but also involving Europe, other Asian states, and of course Russia. These conflicts often take a geoeconomic form — fights over control of production networks, trade flows, and investment regimes. So yes, elites are at war with one another, economically and politically.

The question then becomes: what do the working classes and marginalized communities do in this context? In some cases — and we can be critical of this, but I also understand where it comes from — we see working-class organizations, including unions, align with their domestic bourgeoisie. Not necessarily the whole capitalist class, but the corporate actors in their immediate sector. This may be part of a broader strategy of economic nationalism or protectionism, where benefits to domestic industry — and therefore jobs — soften class conflict and make workers’ interests appear to converge with those of employers.

This dynamic isn’t new. It’s a familiar strategy from the 20th century — aligning labor with capital through nationalism. But it’s striking to see it playing out now in cutting-edge sectors like battery manufacturing or critical minerals.

At the same time, we’re also witnessing efforts to build cross-border labor organizing. We’ve seen some of this in Europe, along the U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada borders, and in parts of Latin America. These examples are often fragile, but they’re real and worth learning from.

Still, it’s a challenging moment. Working-class people around the world find themselves in vulnerable positions, facing difficult choices among bad options. But precisely because we’re in a moment of warring elites, there’s an opening for reinvigorated internationalism.

We can even go back to early 20th-century socialist analyses around World War I, where the critique of elite warfare was central: these wars are not in the interest of the working class, even when they’re sold as such. So perhaps, as the elites are yelling at each other and messing up our lives in the process, we can actually rededicate ourselves to internationalism, to sowing the seeds of a more solidaristic and cooperative global political economy from the ground up because I don’t see the elites interested in cooperation at all.

Not purely from below — I don’t believe in romanticizing grassroots movements in isolation — but through a dialectic between grassroots militancy and political engagement. We need political allies, but the energy, ideas, and mobilization have to come from below.

To end on a concrete example: in the book, I talk about what’s happening on the global extractive frontier. You opened our conversation with this concept, and I think it’s an important place to focus. Along this frontier, there are a lot of communities and workers affected by the operations of extractive capitalism in ways that, as we discussed earlier, despite the divides betwee n the North and South, can actually look quite similar on the ground because it’s the same mining companies doing the same stuff to different people in different places.

What’s remarkable is that over the past two decades, beginning in Latin America but expanding globally, these frontline communities have built increasingly dense networks across national borders and world regions. They share information, they adopt similar protest tactics, and in some cases, they coordinate actions against the same corporations. These are often informal connections, but sometimes more formalized, and they are impressive given the obstacles — logistical, financial, and political — that these communities face.

I think it’s quite an interesting example to look at precisely because these communities are some of the most marginalized in the world. They often live in rural hinterlands which means that there’s often logistical complexity even in connecting to the internet or traveling to a global activist convening. It’s really hard financially, logistically for these communities to do that, and they’re also up against very powerful companies so the asymmetries are quite severe. So the fact that, given all of that, despite or because of it, depending on your perspective - these frontline communities and their allies in ecological movements and in left-wing political movements have been able to address the issue of extraction across borders with some degree of coordination, I think that raises the question: Can other grassroots and worker constituencies involved in the energy transition — whether labor unions, social movements, or community organizations — also do something similar to what we’re seeing from the groups more specifically addressing mining and extraction?