Capitalism unsustainable – makes extinction inevitable – if we win overaccumulation is inevitable its try-or-die to orient yourself towards radical social movements to avoid capitalist realism

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.

This represents a new historical situation, especially to Marxism that has been treated like ‘a dead dog’ after the collapse of actually existing socialism. As environmentalists learn to unequivocally problematize the irrationality of the current economic system, Marxism now has a chance of revival if it can contribute to enriching debates and social movements by providing not only a thorough critique of the capitalist mode of production but also a concrete vision of post-capitalist society. However, this revival has not taken place so far, and persistent doubts remain about the usefulness of having recourse to the Marxian legacy in the 21st century. Marx’s political optimism most plainly expressed in The Communist Manifesto has been repeatedly cited as evidence of his notorious and unacceptable productivism and ethnocentrism.

It is surely too naïve to believe that the further development of productive forces in Western capitalism could function as an emancipatory driver of history in the face of the global ecological crisis. In fact, the situation today differs decisively compared with that of 1848: capitalism is no longer progressive. It rather destroys the general conditions of production and reproduction and even subjects human and non-human beings to serious existential threat. In short, Marx’s view of historical progress appears hopelessly outdated. In this situation, if there is a slight hope of a revival of Marxism in this historical conjuncture, its essential precondition is the radical reformulation of its infamous grand scheme of ‘historical materialism’ that pivots around the contradiction between ‘productive forces’ and ‘relations of production’. This constitutes the central topics of this book in order not to end (human) history but to envision another clear, bright future from a Marxian perspective without falling into pessimism and apocalypticism in the face of global ecological crisis.

Such a project cannot avoid the problem of ‘nature’. This is all the more so because the end of the ‘end of history’ brought about the end of the ‘end of nature’. Bill McKibben (1989) once warned that the idea of nature that the modern world presupposed for a long time is gone for good because global capitalism considerably modified the entire planet, leaving no pristine nature untouched.1 This situation is now generally called the Anthropocene, in which humankind has become a ‘major geological force’ (Crutzen and Stroermer 2000: 18) with massive scientific and technological power capable of transforming the entire planet on an unprecedented scale.2

The reality of the Anthropocene is, however, far from realizing the modern dream of human emancipation through the domination of nature. Climate change accompanied by sea-level rise, wildfires, heatwaves and change of precipitation patterns shows how the ‘end of nature’ dialectically turns into the ‘return of nature’ (Foster 2020); the earth and its limits are more and more tangible in such a way that humans can no longer control nature’s power. It even subjugates them as an independent and alien force. In other words, the modern Baconian project is collapsing. Confronted with this increasing uncontrollability of nature, various critical theories of nature including eco-Marxism take up the urgent task of rethinking the relationship between humanity and nature (Rosa, Henning and Bueno 2021). However, the dominant narrative of the Anthropocene is a monist approach characterized by the hybridity of the social and the natural (Latour 2014; Moore 2015), which is critical of Marxism. In contrast, the current project aims to enrich the debate concerning the human–nature relationship by putting forward Marx’s dualist methodology based on his theory of metabolism.

This theoretical task has important practical implications today. By comprehending Marx’s method correctly, we can also recognize the unique contribution his work offers to recent debates on post-capitalism. And here is the third ‘end’ of post–Cold War values, that is, ‘the end of capitalist realism’. Mark Fisher (2009) once lamented that ‘capitalist realism’ – the sense that ‘it is easier … to imagine the end of the world than of capitalism’ ( Jameson 2016: 3) – severely constrains our political imagination, subjugating us to the regime of capital. The same tendency is discernible in environmentalism: ‘It is easier to imagine a total catastrophe which ends all life on earth than it is to imagine a real change in capitalist relations’ (Žižek 2008: 334). However, as the multi-stranded crises of economy, democracy, care and the environment deepen, the tendency of which was strengthened even more by the COVID19 pandemic and the Russo-Ukrainian War, there are growing calls for radical ‘system change’. Both Slavoj Žižek (2020a) and Andreas Malm (2020) argue for ‘war communism’, while John Bellamy Foster (2020) and Michael Löwy (2015) defend the idea of ‘ecosocialism’.

In addition, there are intensive discussions on ‘life after capitalism’ ( Jackson 2021) even among non-Marxist scholars. Thomas Piketty’s (2021) dictum that it is ‘time for socialism’ is exemplary here, but a more ecological version of the same argument can be found in Naomi Klein’s explicit endorsement of the idea of ‘ecosocialism’:

Let’s acknowledge this fact [that the Soviet Union and Venezuela are unecological], while also pointing out that countries with a strong democratic socialist tradition – like Denmark, Sweden, and Uruguay – have some of the most visionary environmental policies in the world. From this we can conclude that socialism isn’t necessarily ecological, but that a new form of democratic eco-socialism, with the humility to learn from Indigenous teachings about the duties to future generations and the interconnection of all of life, appears to be humanity’s best shot at collective survival. (Klein 2019: 251; emphasis added)3