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Marx’s idea of degrowth communism is founded upon the radical abundance of communal wealth (genossenschaftlicher Reichtum). It does not require unlimited growth because the abundance of common wealth can be multiplied by abolishing the artificial scarcity of the commodity and money and by sharing social and natural wealth with others. This offers an important insight for reconstructing how Marx after 1868 strove to find a way of repairing the metabolic rift, which he characterized as ‘irreparable’ in volume III of Capital. Carl-Erich Vollgraf judges that Marx’s language here is haunted by an ‘apocalyptic metaphor’ that leaves no space for the future optimism and that he would not have used the same expression in the final manuscript if he were able to complete volume III (Vollgraf 2016: 130). Vollgraf ’s concern arises from the fact that, when reading Capital, volume III, one cannot find Marx’s explanation about how ‘the freely associated producers’ would be able to ‘govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power’. Marx’s silence here signifies the incomplete character of Capital.

Under a productivist reading, the subsequent remark about ‘accomplishing [the regulation of human metabolism with nature] with the least expenditure of energy’ ‘instead of being dominated by it as a blind power’ is understood as the manipulation of natural phenomena through intensive and extensive usage of technologies. Of course, the rational regulation of natural law is essential for the sake of successfully carrying out labour. However, one should also recall that human metabolism with nature came to be dominated by a ‘blind power’ not only due to a lack of natural scientific knowledge but due to the reified social relations that exist under capitalism. For Marx, this is the main reason labour in capitalism cannot be carried out ‘in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature’ even given today’s level of technology. Alien social power of capital is so strong that the recognition of natural law alone does not allow humans to regulate their metabolism with the environment in a ‘rational’ (that is, sustainable) manner and leads to the waste of so much energy and resources for the sake of infinite capital accumulation. Seen from this perspective, the human metabolism with nature under capitalism turns out to be irrational because it is far from satisfying social needs ‘with the least expenditure of energy’. This is why as long as the dominance of this blind power of reified things persists, the metabolic rift will be ‘irreparable’.

Fifth, the hoped-for revolutionary change can only occur through human agency. Although it is widely recognized that the world needs an ecological and social revolution, the question remains: From whence and by what agency will such a revolution arise? Ecological Marxists suggest that we may already be seeing signs of the rise of what could be called a nascent “environmental proletariat”—a broad mass of working-class humanity who recognize, as a result of the crisis of their own existence, the indissoluble bond between economic and ecological conditions. 56 Degraded material conditions associated with intermingled economic and ecological crises are now being encountered on a daily basis by the great majority of the world’s population and affecting all aspects of their lives. At the ground level, economic and ecological crises are becoming increasingly indistinguishable. Food crises, land grabs, electricity shutdowns, water privatization, heightened pollution, deteriorating cities, declining public health, increasing violence against oppressed populations—are all converging with growing inequality, economic stagnation, and rising unemployment and underemployment. In South Africa, for example, the class struggle is now as much an environmental as an economic struggle— already exhibiting signs of an emerging environmental working class. 57 The logical result is a coming together of material revolts against the system— what David Harvey has usefully referred to as a “co-revolutionary” struggle. 58 This is best exemplified by the global environmental/climate justice movement and through the radical direct action movement that Naomi Klein calls “Blockadia.” 59

Traditional working-class politics are thus co-evolving and combining with environmental struggles, and with the movements of people of color, of women, and all those fighting basic, reproductive battles throughout society. Such an ecological and social struggle will be revolutionary to the extent that it draws its force from those layers of society where people’s lives are most precarious: Third World workers, working-class women, oppressed people of color in the imperial core, indigenous populations, peasants/landless agricultural workers, and those fighting for fundamentally new relations of sexuality, gender, family, and community—as well as highly exploited and dispossessed workers everywhere.

As an extension of the current war on the planet, a regime of climate geoengineering designed to keep the present mode of production going is sharply opposed to the view enunciated by Barry Commoner in 1992 in Making Peace with the Planet: “If the environment is polluted and the economy is sick, the virus that causes both will be found in the system of production.” 28 There can be no doubt today that it is the present mode of production, particularly the system of fossil capital, that needs to change on a global scale. In order to stop climate change, the world economy must quickly shift to zero net carbon dioxide emissions. This is well within reach with a concerted effort by human society as a whole utilizing already existing sustainable technological means—particularly when coupled with necessary changes in social organization to reduce the colossal waste of resources and lives that is built into the current alienated system of production. Such changes could not simply be implemented from the top by elites, but rather would require the self-mobilization of the population, inspired by the revolutionary actions of youth aimed at egalitarian, ecological, collective, and socialized solutions—recognizing that it is the world they will inherit that is most at stake.

Today’s necessary ecological revolution would include for starters: (1) an emergency moratorium on economic growth in the rich countries coupled with downward redistribution of income and wealth; (2) radical reductions in greenhouse gas emissions; (3) rapid phase-out of the entire fossil fuel energy structure; (4) substitution of an alternative energy infrastructure based on sustainable alternatives such as solar and wind power and rooted in local control; (5) massive cuts in military spending with the freed-up economic surplus to be used for ecological conversion; (6) promotion of circular economies and zerowaste systems to decrease the throughput of energy and resources; (7) building effective public transportation, together with measures to decrease dependence on the private automobile; (8) restoration of global ecosystems in line with local, including Indigenous, communities; (9) transformation of destructive, energy-and chemical-intensive agribusiness-monocultural production into agroecology, based on sustainable small farms and peasant cultivation with their greater productivity of food per acre; (10) institution of strong controls on the emission of toxic chemicals; (11) prohibition of the privatization of freshwater resources; (12) imposition of strong, human community– based management of the ocean commons geared to sustainability; (13) institution of dramatic new measures to protect endangered species; (14) strict limits on excessive and destructive consumer marketing by corporations; (15) reorganization of production to break down current commodity chains geared to rapacious accumulation and the philosophy of après moi le déluge; and (16) the development of more rational, equitable, less wasteful, and more collective forms of production. 29

A revolutionary struggle in these circumstances will need to occur in two phases: an ecodemocratic phase in the immediate present, seeking to build a broad alliance—one in which the vast majority of humanity outside of the ruling interests will be compelled by their inhuman conditions to demand a world of sustainable human development. Over time this should create the conditions for a second, more decisive, ecosocialist phase of the revolutionary struggle, directed at the creation of a society of substantive equality, ecological sustainability, and collective democracy. All of this points to the translation of classical Marx’s ecological critique into contemporary revolutionary praxis. 60

In the ecodemocratic phase, the goal would be to carry out those radical reforms that would arrest the current destructive logic of capital, by fighting for changes that are radical, even revolutionary, in that they go against the logic of capital, but are nonetheless conceivable as concrete, meaningful forms of struggle in the present context. These would include measures like: (1) an emergency plan of reduction in carbon emissions in the rich economies by 8 to 10 percent a year; (2) implementing a moratorium on economic growth coupled with radical redistribution of income and wealth, conservation of resources, rationing, and reductions in economic waste; (3) diverting military spending, now universally called “defense spending” to the defense of the planet as a place of human habitation; (4) the creation of an alternative energy infrastructure designed to stay within the solar budget; (5) closing down coal-fired plants and blocking unconventional fossil fuels such as tar sands oil; (6) a carbon fee and dividend system of the kind proposed by Hansen that would redistribute 100 percent of the revenue to the population on a per capita basis; (7) global initiatives to aid emerging economies to move toward sustainable development; (8) implementation of principles of environmental justice throughout the society and linking this to adaptation to climate change (which cannot be stopped completely) to ensure that people of color, the poor, women, indigenous populations, and Third World populations do not bear the brunt of catastrophe; and (9) adoption of climate negotiations and policies on the model proposed in the Peoples’ Agreement on Climate Change in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 2010. Such radical change proposals can be multiplied, and would need to affect all aspects of society and individual human development. The rule in the ecodemocratic phase of development would be to address the epochal crisis (ecological and economic) in which the world is now caught, and to do so in ways that go against the logic of business as usual, which is indisputably leading the world toward cumulative catastrophe.

Another commonly advocated technofix, carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), is not strictly a form of geoengineering since it is directed at capturing and sequestering carbon emissions of particular electrical facilities, such as coal-fired power plants. However, the promotion of a CCS infrastructure on a planetary scale as a means of addressing climate change—thereby skirting the necessity of an ecological revolution in production and consumption—is best seen as a form of planetary geoengineering due to its immense projected economic and ecological scale. Although CCS would theoretically allow the burning of fossil fuels from electrical power plants with no carbon emissions into the atmosphere, the scale and the costs of CCS operations are prohibitive. As Clive Hamilton writes in Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering, CCS for a single “standard-sized 1,000 megawatt coal-fired plant … would need 30 kilometers of air-sucking machinery and six chemical plants, with a footprint of 6 square kilometers.” 22 Energy expert Vaclav Smil has calculated that, “in order to sequester just a fifth of current [2010] CO2 emissions we would have to create an entirely new worldwide absorption-gathering-compression-transportation- storage industry whose annual throughput would have to be about 70 percent larger than the annual volume now handled by the global crude oil industry, whose immense infrastructure of wells, pipelines, compressor stations and storage took generations to build.” 23 Capturing and sequestering current U.S. carbon dioxide emissions would require 130 billion tons of water per year, equal to about half the annual flow of the Columbia River. This new gigantic infrastructure would be placed on top of the current fossil fuel infrastructure —all in order to allow for the continued burning of fossil fuels. 24

Among the various CDR schemas, it is BECCS, because of its promise of negative emissions, that today is attracting the most support. This is because it seems to allow nations to overshoot climate targets on the basis that the carbon can be removed from the atmosphere decades later. Although BECCS exists at present largely as an untested computer model, it is now incorporated into almost all climate models utilized by the IPCC. 16 As modeled, BECCS would burn cultivated crops in order to generate electricity, with the capture and underground storage of the resulting carbon dioxide. In theory, since plant crops can be seen as carbon neutral—taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and then eventually releasing it again —BECCS, by burning biomass and then capturing and sequestering the resulting carbon emissions, would be a means of generating electricity while at the same time resulting in a net reduction of atmospheric carbon.

BECCS, however, comes into question the moment one moves from the abstract to the concrete. The IPCC’s median-level models are projected to remove 630 gigatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, around twothirds of the total emitted between the Industrial Revolution and 2011. 17 This would occur on vast crop plantations to be run by agribusiness. To remove a trillion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as envisioned in the more ambitious scenarios would take up a land twice the size of India (or equal to Australia), about half as much land as currently farmed globally, requiring a supply of freshwater equal to current total global agricultural usage. 18 The costs of implementing BECCS on the imagined scales have been estimated by climatologist James Hansen—who critically notes that negative emissions have “spread like a cancer” in the IPCC climate models— to be on the order of hundreds of trillions of dollars, with “minimal estimated costs” ranging as high as $570 trillion this century. 19 The effects of BECCS—used as a primary mechanism and designed to avoid confrontation with the present system of production—would therefore be a massive displacement of small farmers and global food production.

The first form of CDR to attract significant attention from economic interests and investors was the idea of fertilizing the ocean with iron, thereby boosting the growth of phytoplankton so as to promote greater ocean uptake of carbon. There have been a dozen experiments in this area and the difficulties attending this scheme have proven to be legion. The effects on the ecological cycles of phytoplankton, zooplankton, and a host of other marine species all the way up to whales at the top of the food chain are indeterminate. Although some parts of the ocean would become greener due to the additional iron, other parts would become bluer, more devoid of life, because they would be deprived of the nutrients—nitrate, phosphorus, and silica—needed for growth. 14 Evidence suggests that the vast portion of the carbon taken in by the ocean would stay on the surface or the intermediate levels of the ocean, with only a tiny part entering the ocean depths, where it would be naturally sequestered. 15

Foster 22 [John Bellamy Foster is an American professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of the Monthly Review. He writes about political economy of capitalism and economic crisis, ecology and ecological crisis, and Marxist theory.; “Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution”; Monthly Review Press; August 23, 2022]//eleanor

What remains certain is that any attempt to implement geoengineering (even in the form of technological schemes for carbon removal) as the dominant strategy for addressing global warming, subordinated to the ends of capital accumulation, would prove fatal to humanity. The costs of such action, the burden it would put on future generations, and the dangers to living species, including our own, are so great that the only rational course is a long ecological revolution aimed at the most rapid possible reduction in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions, coupled with an emphasis on agroecology and restoration of global ecosystems, including forests, to absorb carbon dioxide. 4 This would need to be accompanied by a far-reaching reconstitution of society at large, aimed at the reinstitution on a higher level of collective and egalitarian practices that were undermined by the rise of capitalism.

The COVID-19 pandemic and confinement period has also been an occasion to observe decoupling and rebounds (Alcott, 2005; Polimeni, 2012) within societies adjusting to a dramatic, involuntary downscaling of socio-economic activities due to global lockdowns. In April 2020, in comparison to 2019 values, daily global CO2 emissions had decreased by around 17% (Le Quéré et al., 2020). Values exhibited in the peak low of emissions during COVID-19 were equal to those corresponding to 2006 values – 14 years ago (Canadell et al., 2020). However, several months after, studies detected a rapid rebound (Harvey, 2020), and in 2021 global energy-related CO2 emissions are projected to grow once again by 4.8% (IEA, 2021). It is often argued that decoupling is bound by temporal features such that decoupling is usually followed by periods of no decoupling or even recoupling, making it a challenge for becoming a permanent and continuous matter (Vadén et al., 2020; Williamson, 2021). The notion of rebound is also captured where in some instances, the very act of solving environmental problems in itself spends resources and may even create additional problems that were previously unthinkable (Allen et al., 2003).

15.5 Discussion and Conclusions

Recent literature argues that there is little or no evidence in terms of absolute decoupling looking into embodied energy in trade, material consumption, resource use, and emissions.

Akizu-Gardoki et al. (2018) devise an alternative “Decoupling Index” that uses 126 countries’ total primary energy footprints (rather than total primary energy supplies), taking into account embodied energy imported with goods and services. Within a 14-year period of analysis (2000–2014), the authors empirically show that 93 countries7 disprove decoupling; while 27 show absolute decoupling for the analysis period, with only 6 countries (ESP, ITA, HUN, GBR, JPN, and FRA) with a Human Development Index of 0.8 above maintain absolute decoupling over time (ibid.).

Marx’s idea of degrowth communism is founded upon the radical abundance of communal wealth (genossenschaftlicher Reichtum). It does not require unlimited growth because the abundance of common wealth can be multiplied by abolishing the artificial scarcity of the commodity and money and by sharing social and natural wealth with others. This offers an important insight for reconstructing how Marx after 1868 strove to find a way of repairing the metabolic rift, which he characterized as ‘irreparable’ in volume III of Capital. Carl-Erich Vollgraf judges that Marx’s language here is haunted by an ‘apocalyptic metaphor’ that leaves no space for the future optimism and that he would not have used the same expression in the final manuscript if he were able to complete volume III (Vollgraf 2016: 130). Vollgraf ’s concern arises from the fact that, when reading Capital, volume III, one cannot find Marx’s explanation about how ‘the freely associated producers’ would be able to ‘govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power’. Marx’s silence here signifies the incomplete character of Capital.

Under a productivist reading, the subsequent remark about ‘accomplishing [the regulation of human metabolism with nature] with the least expenditure of energy’ ‘instead of being dominated by it as a blind power’ is understood as the manipulation of natural phenomena through intensive and extensive usage of technologies. Of course, the rational regulation of natural law is essential for the sake of successfully carrying out labour. However, one should also recall that human metabolism with nature came to be dominated by a ‘blind power’ not only due to a lack of natural scientific knowledge but due to the reified social relations that exist under capitalism. For Marx, this is the main reason labour in capitalism cannot be carried out ‘in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature’ even given today’s level of technology. Alien social power of capital is so strong that the recognition of natural law alone does not allow humans to regulate their metabolism with the environment in a ‘rational’ (that is, sustainable) manner and leads to the waste of so much energy and resources for the sake of infinite capital accumulation. Seen from this perspective, the human metabolism with nature under capitalism turns out to be irrational because it is far from satisfying social needs ‘with the least expenditure of energy’. This is why as long as the dominance of this blind power of reified things persists, the metabolic rift will be ‘irreparable’.

One of the world’s most respected economists believes the banking crisis is far from over, and that U.S. authorities are merely buying themselves some time by insisting the banking system is “sound.”

Nouriel Roubini, chief executive of consulting firm Roubini Macro Associates, argued on Friday that the financial system will be unable to cope with the sheer scale of private and public debt that has already been amassed, spawning a “trilemma” that will soon trigger another phase of panic.

Despite holding out the promise of a low-emissions future, lithium production itself comes with eye-watering environmental costs. More than 2.2 million litres of water is needed to mine one tonne of the metal, according to Fairfield Market Research. Extracting the metal is also associated with the release of borax, potassium, and manganese into local water supplies.

From Chile to Serbia, conflict has erupted between miners and people who live near lithium deposits. In North Carolina, residents in the town of Cherryville have railed against plans by Australia-based Piedmont Lithium to open a lithium mine, pointing to unsightly scars left in the landscape by previous miners during the 1950s.

Lithium, the highly reactive silver-white metal that is a crucial ingredient in batteries used in electric vehicles (EVs), is becoming much more expensive – and fast.

In April, as prices hit a record $78,000 a tonne, Tesla CEO Elon Musk floated the idea of the electric carmaker mining and refining the lightweight metal itself due to the “insane” increase in costs.

This is not a new global vulnerability, but it now coincides with the systemic crisis that the U.S. faces, as I laid out in my book “The Storm Before the Calm.” That book predicted a social crisis early in this decade, followed by a massive economic crisis. Along with that, there would emerge a political crisis and a major, once-in-every-80-years institutional crisis in the federal government. Finally, it predicted a profound change in government near the end of the decade, driven by political and economic forces.

Looking at history, what is striking is that in previous cycles, the social issues tended to subside a bit before terminal economic issues took over. In 1980, as economic issues dominated, the intense social issues of race and sexual culture in the 1970s had subsided somewhat. In 1932, the social aspects faded with the death of Huey Long and the onset of the Great Depression. The strength of the Ku Klux Klan subsided, and social issues linked to immigration gave way to economic concerns.

When costs go up, so do profits? That’s not how capitalism is supposed to work, but that is the recent trend. For over a year now, consumers and businesses, both in the U.S. and worldwide, have struggled with stubborn inflation. But the soaring costs haven’t prevented corporations from raking in record profits. The companies in last year’s Fortune 500 alone generated an all-time high $1.8 trillion in profit on $16.1 trillion in revenue. Voices largely on the left side of the political spectrum have been sounding the alarm on this—think: Bernie Sanders in Congress or Jon Stewart’s recent grilling of former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers—but now an economist at one of the world’s oldest and greatest investment banks is singing the same tune.

Albert Edwards, a global strategist at the 159-year-old bank Société Générale, just released a blistering note on the phenomenon that has come to be called Greedflation. Corporations, particularly in developed economies like the U.S. and U.K., have used rising raw material costs amid the pandemic and the war in Ukraine as an “excuse” to raise prices and expand profit margins to new heights, he said. And the French investment bank isn’t just historic: It’s one of the select banks considered to be “systemically important” by the Financial Stability Board, the G20’s international body dedicated to safeguarding the global financial system.

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB)—the second largest bank failure in nominal terms in US history—and the ongoing turbulence in the banking system, raising the prospect of more failures, is another expression of the historic crisis of US and global capitalism.

This deepening rot and decay constitute the underlying driving force of two interconnected developments in US and world politics: the rapid escalation towards a third world war and the ongoing and intensifying assault on the working class in the US and internationally, as the ruling classes seek to make it pay for the existential crisis of their outmoded and reactionary private profit system.

The world is on fire. We are experiencing ‘the end of the end of history’ (Hochuli, Hoare and Cunliffe 2021). With the rapid deepening of the global ecological crisis in various forms such as climate change, oxidation of the ocean, disruption of the nitrogen cycle, desertification, soil erosion and loss of biodiversity, Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of ‘the end of history’ after the collapse of the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) (Fukuyama 1992) is approaching a totally unexpected dead end today, namely the end of human history. In fact, the triumph of neoliberal globalization only accelerated the rapid increase in environmental impacts upon the earth by human activities since the end of the Second World War – the so called ‘Great Acceleration’, the age in which all major socio-economic and Earth system trends record a hockey stick pattern of increase (McNeil and Engelke 2016) – and ultimately destabilized the foundation of human civilization. Pandemic, war and climate breakdown are all symptomatic of ‘the end of history’, putting democracy, capitalism and ecological systems into chronic crisis.

Many people are well aware of the fact that the current mode of living is heading towards catastrophe, but the capitalist system does not offer an alternative to the juggernaut of overproduction and overconsumption. Nor is there any compelling reason to believe that it will soon do so because capitalism’s systemic compulsion continues to employ fossil fuel consumption despite consistent warnings, knowledge and opposition. Considering the fact that rapid, deep decarbonization that could meet the 1.5-degree-Celsius target of the Paris Agreement requires thorough transformative changes in virtually every sphere of society, more radical social movements embracing direct action have emerged, demanding to uproot the capitalist system (Extinction Rebellion 2019). In this context, when Greta Thunberg denounced the ‘fairy tales of eternal growth’ in a speech, she made it explicit that the capitalist system that aims for infinite accumulation on a finite planet is the root cause of climate breakdown.

Economically, global capitalism faces what is known in technical language as “overaccumulation”: a situation in which the economy has produced — or has the capacity to produce — great quantities of wealth but the market cannot absorb this wealth because of escalating inequality. Capitalism by its very nature will produce abundant wealth yet polarize that wealth and generate ever greater levels of social inequality unless offset by redistributive policies. The level of global social polarization and inequality now experienced is without precedent. In 2018, the richest 1 percent of humanity controlled more than half of the world’s wealth while the bottom 80 percent had to make do with just 5 percent. The international development agency Oxfam reported in January that during the first two years of the coronavirus pandemic, the 10 richest men in the world more than doubled their fortunes, from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion, while 99 percent of humanity saw a fall in their income and 160 million more people fell into poverty.

Such inequalities end up undermining the stability of the system as the gap grows between what is — or could be — produced and what the market can absorb. The extreme concentration of the planet’s wealth in the hands of the few and the accelerated impoverishment and dispossession of the majority means that the transnational capitalist class, or TCC, has increasing difficulty in finding productive outlets to unload enormous amounts of surplus it accumulated. In the years leading up to the pandemic, there was a steady rise in underutilized capacity and a slowdown in industrial production around the world. The surplus of accumulated capital with nowhere to go expanded rapidly. Transnational corporations recorded record profits during the 2010s at the same time that corporate investment declined. Along with militarized accumulation, the TCC has turned to unprecedented levels of financial speculation and to debt-driven growth to sustain profit-making in the face of the crisis. If left unchecked, overaccumulation results in crisis — in stagnation, recessions, depressions, social upheavals and war — just what we are experiencing right now.

In terms of accounting for emissions decoupling, a recent study by the Breakthrough Institute (Hausfather, 2021) highlights that 32 countries have managed to demonstrate economic growth while CO2 emissions declined since 2005, even when accounting for emissions embodied in the goods consumed in a country. However, they note with caution that these economies are already wealthy-service driven economies and that very few examples are present from low- or middleincome countries based on extractive industries and energy-intensive manufacturing to date. While this study can present a departure narrative of consumption-based emissions and absolute decoupling as we switch to clearer technologies, we must not forget that extraction and resource dependence remain intact on the supply side – supplies and sinks being the two sides of the same coin of the decoupling phenomena.