Gas and Racial Capitalism – Pamphlet by We Smell Gas

Our friends from We Smell Gas designed a pamphlet to help comrades across movements understand why thinking about energy - specifically fossil gas - and racial capitalism together is important, and to demonstrate how they materially work in tandem. The main part of the pamphlet is concerned with seven tools that support the expansion of the gas industry relying on and reinforcing racial structures of exclusion, expulsion and exploitation which make certain lands and peoples less valuable and others racially superior profiteers. One of these tools is debt.

We Smell Gas invited us as Debt for climate to collaborate on this chapter. So we are proud to present the pamphlet,  which you can download here. If you want a copy – go to events by We Smell Gas!

Pinpointing how debt is used as a tool of racial capitalism is not an easy task as the mechanisms of debt are manifold. First (and in the context of the fossil gas industry maybe foremost) debt is used as an argument to push for extractive projects by promising those projects will help repay the debt that is owed. In reality, these projects deepen colonial export dependencies and fill pipelines with fossil gas.

An example for this is Argentina, which only recently, in April 2025, signed a new agreement with the IMF. Despite widespread strikes against President Milei’s austerity measures, the IMF praised the Milei government’s “impressive progress”. Historically, the IMF has promoted fracking in the Vaca Muerta oil and gas fields - linking fossil fuel extraction directly to debt repayment strategies.

This direct link between debt and extractive projects which destroy the territories and life of racialized people is not the only way in which debt works as a tool of racial capitalism. Extending the chapter we wrote together with We Smell Gas, we may point to three further ways.

First, loans by the IMF and the World Bank come with conditions which often impose privatization of land, resources or state companies. This privatization is preceded by dispossession moving through racialized hierarchies, which often follows the scheme of taking access to land, resources or infrastructure from indigenous and black groups and assigned it to investors from the Global North.

Second, debt strangles countries through austerity politics deteriorating the ability to invest in health, education or disaster control. Thereby it creates disposable populations – again being located geographically mainly in the Global South.

Third, the moralization of the financial debt of the Global South as being due to mismanagement or ‘inferior stages of development’ feeds into a racist narrative of ‘linear development’ and failed states. This racist narrative in turn is drawn upon when justifying the imposition of Global North interests onto Global South states, for example in IMF programs or traditional development aid.