These movements expose the Luzon Economic Corridor not as a national development plan, but as a violent mechanism of  US-led imperialist plunder and war  that converts sovereign land into an extractive garrison for foreign capital while forcing dispossessed rural populations into the precarious ranks of the informal semi-proletariat.

The convergence of crude oil surpassing $100 per barrel and the acceleration of El Niño to “super” status—drawn from projections and reports by energy-market analysts, international economic-monitoring bodies, and climate agencies tracking compound global shocks—exposes the deep structural crisis of monopoly capitalism. This dual rupture demonstrates how imperialist war-making, extractive plunder, planetary warming, and the ongoing enclosure of the countryside function not as separate phenomena, but as interconnected expressions of the same underlying logic of capital accumulation.

The rapid climb of crude oil past $100 per barrel cannot be detached from the escalation of U.S.-led imperialist aggression, military blockades, and regional destabilization. Financialized markets and transnational fossil-fuel monopolies exploit war and artificial scarcity to protect superprofits, while the resulting inflation functions as a mechanism of structural extraction from working classes in colonies and semicolonies. Peripheral societies are forced to absorb the crisis through debt traps, budget cuts, declining purchasing power, and reduced national sovereignty. High energy prices further incentivize ruling elites to expand speculative and destructive extraction projects in the name of energy security and geopolitical hegemony.

This energy regime is increasingly bound up with “Pax Silica”—the global alliance centered on microelectronics, semiconductor supply chains, and automated defense systems. Localized military interventions rely on a global network of critical mineral extraction, energy consumption, and defense technology transfer. The fusion of high-tech militarism and fossil capital reinforces imperialist control over global supply lines, shifting the operational costs of planetary warfare directly onto the working classes of the Global South.

Super El Niño and the accelerated enclosure of the countryside

At the same time, a “super” El Niño brings the violence of ecological crisis directly to the doorsteps of the global peasantry, smallholders, and urban poor. Although the historical carbon footprint belongs overwhelmingly to the industrial centers of the imperialist world, the physical destruction—manifested in crop failures, severe drought, flooding, and damaged infrastructure—falls disproportionately on semicolonial societies. Framing these events as merely “natural disasters” shields the capitalist mode of production from critique and obscures climate catastrophe as an institutionalized assault on oppressed and economically vulnerable populations.

Far from resolving the agrarian question, this ecological and economic squeeze accelerates what Paris Yeros calls generalized semiproletarianization. In this condition, households that have lost all or part of their means of production do not become fully dependent on wages. Instead, they combine precarious employment with small-scale farming, petty trade, subsistence production, care work, and other sources of livelihood (Yeros, 2023). Across much of the Global South, this blurs the conventional boundary between peasant and worker and produces socially fragmented labor forces that move between rural and urban economies (Moyo & Yeros, 2005; Moyo et al., 2013; Yeros, 2024).

Under conditions of monopoly capitalism, these labor reserves can weaken workers’ bargaining power and shift the costs of social reproduction onto households and communities (Marx, 1976; Yeros, 2023). Millions may circulate between degraded smallholder farming, informal street trade, temporary migration, and precarious wage work without being absorbed into secure urban industrial employment. Rather than representing a simple transition from peasant production to wage labor, semiproletarianization describes a durable social formation in which rural and urban livelihood strategies remain interdependent (Yeros, 2023).

Beyond Western ecosocialism

To propose “ecosocialism” as a generic, off-the-shelf alternative to this twin crisis, without subjecting the term itself to critical scrutiny, is to risk reproducing a dangerous conceptual trap. Much dominant Western-centered ecosocialist discourse reduces the problem to an abstract, planet-wide carbon-accounting exercise. In doing so, it can erase the national question, gloss over the unresolved agrarian question, and ignore the necessity of national-liberation struggles in colonies and semicolonies.

When Euro-American ecological theories prescribe universal “degrowth” or an immediate, blanket shutdown of extractive industries without accounting for imperialist subjugation, they risk demanding that peripheral nations remain permanently underdeveloped. This framing fails to recognize that energy access, industrial sovereignty, and resource control in the Global South are not merely ecological choices; they are arenas of intense anti-imperialist struggle. A political ecology centered on the Global South must therefore address unequal exchange, imperial domination, and the sovereign development of productive forces (Ajl, 2023).

This concrete reality is clearly visible in the Philippines, where the imperialist push for “Pax Silica” materializes through the U.S.-backed Luzon Economic Corridor—an infrastructure hub designed to secure semiconductor supply chains, clean energy enclaves, and military logistics across Subic, Clark, Manila, and Batangas. Under the guise of high-tech development, over 1,600 hectares of agricultural and ancestral land in New Clark City, Capas, Tarlac have been designated for industrial expansion and smart-city processing hubs. This massive enclosure directly dispossesses smallholder farmers and indigenous Ayta communities in places like Barangay O’Donnell, severing their access to ancestral domains, threatening local water systems, and deepening the crisis of rural landlessness.

Where capital encounters resistance to this plunder, its liberal mask drops to reveal the violent enforcement of state fascism. During demonstrations against the Luzon Economic Corridor Investment Forum at the Bonifacio Global City (BGC) forum, state security forces unleashed brute repression against peaceful protesters, academics, and legal defenders. Police forces physically threw demonstrators to the pavement, with heavy physical force. Paralegals who document human rights violations to uphold constitutional safeguards  during protests were arrested alongside protesters. Though these detained activists were eventually freed through resolute mass mobilization and legal pressure, their temporary imprisonment exposes how the US-Marcos Jr regime deploys naked fascism to police the margins of imperialist investment zones.

This state violence cannot be viewed as an isolated police excess; it demonstrates how fascism functions as the political reflex of capitalism in crisis, enforcing the discipline of foreign monopolies over dispossessed bodies. As Bertolt Brecht incisively warned during the rise of European fascism: “Those who are against fascism without being against capitalism, who lament the barbarism that comes out of barbarism, are like people who wish to eat their calf without slaughtering it.”

Despite this brutal enforcement, a broad anti-imperialist network—comprising peasant unions, indigenous organizations, environmental defenders, cultural workers, and urban laborers—has mobilized a sustained wave of resistance. Their actions span street marches and caravans opposing the investment forums, art exhibits exposing high-tech extravagance, and recent Cultural Solidarity Programs directly in Tarlac, where radical arts, educational teach-ins, and community mobilizations unite indigenous Aeta and peasant voices. These movements expose the Luzon Economic Corridor not as a national development plan, but as a violent mechanism of  US-led imperialist plunder and war  that converts sovereign land into an extractive garrison for foreign capital while forcing dispossessed rural populations into the precarious ranks of the informal semi-proletariat.

A genuine alternative cannot be constructed through abstract environmentalism alone. It must emerge from the real historical movement of the oppressed majority: landless peasants, smallholders, rural wage laborers, and the expanding urban semiproletariat. For these classes, ecological destruction is not an isolated issue to be managed by international NGOs or carbon markets. It is bound up with land dispossession, foreign debt, food dependence, and military encirclement by core capitalist powers.

Therefore, breaking the stranglehold of $100-plus oil and a “super” El Niño requires centering national-liberation struggles advanced through a worker-peasant alliance. Radical redistributive agrarian reform, food sovereignty, and popular control over energy resources are not secondary issues to be addressed after the planet is saved. They are part of the material basis for challenging imperialism and constructing a more ecologically balanced society.

Editor’s note: Bulatlat has adopted “Ayta” in its stylebook to refer to the Indigenous peoples in Central Luzon. The term, Ayta groups said, best reflects the identity of the Indigenous peoples.

The post Blood Rush | $100 barrel, super El Niño and Pax Silica: Energy hegemony, enclosure, and national liberation appeared first on Bulatlat.

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