B. Misplaced focus on fossil fuels obscures Puritan productivism at the heart of capitalism driving human extinction

(Editor-in-Chief Rosie Warren Editorial Collective Jamie Allinson Charlotte Heltai John McDonald China Miéville Kevin Ochieng Okoth Annie Olaloku-Teriba Barnaby Raine Richard Seymour Rosie Warren Art & Fiction Editor China Miéville Poetry Editor Caitlín Doherty https://salvage.zone/the-tragedy-of-the-worker-towards-the-proletarocene/ , 1-31)

Capitalism, like certain bacteria, like the death-drive, is immortal. It has its limits and crises but, perversely, seems to thrive on these. Unlike the multi-species life-systems powering it, the only terminal limit to capital’s perpetual augmentation is, if driven toward from within, external: either revolution or human extinction; communism, or the common ruin of the contending classes. Long ago, both Max Weber and Walter Benjamin pointed out an occulted religious foundation in capitalist civilisation. As Michael Löwy points out, Benjamin, by defining capitalism as a cultic religion, went much farther than Weber in identifying a Puritan/Capitalist guilt-driven imperative to accumulate. ‘The duration of the cult,’ for Benjamin, ‘is permanent’. There are ‘no days which are not holidays’, and ‘nothing has meaning that is not immediately related to the cult’. In what sense is capitalism a cult? What are its rituals, its fetishes? Those of investment, speculating, buying and selling. It has no dogma other than those ‘real abstractions’, as Alfred Sohn-Rethel put it, entailed by its rituals. In Sohn-Rethel’s words, the act of commodity-exchange is the key exemplar of a social action governed by an abstraction of which the participants have no consciousness. The buyer may be concerned only with the sensuous particularities of the commodity, the needs it fills, but behaves in the moment of exchange as though what matters is the quantity of exchange-value embedded in it. Ritual action determines dogma; social being, that is, determines consciousness. Capitalist theology instates, not dogma, but unyielding imperatives governing action. ‘Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!’, Marx sarcastically withered in Capital. Accumulation is, for capital, an imperative and not an option. To exist as a unit of capital in conditions of universal competition, is to accumulate or die. As long, therefore, as there is labour-power to exploit and, in Jason W Moore’s term, ‘cheap nature’ to appropriate, capital will augment itself. This very bifurcation of life into the exploitable and the appropriable, which Moore identifies as the foundation of a ‘Cartesian dualism’ unsustainably counterposing ‘Nature’ to ‘Society’, is not dogma but programme. It is related to a distinctive move of capitalist theology, currently given right-Evangelical sanction by Calvin Beisner and the Cornwall Declaration, to disavow in practice the existence of inherent physical limits. It posits, in its action, the Earth as limitless cornucopia over which humans have dominion, and from which limitless accumulation must be extracted. This disavowal, this ‘real abstraction’, is the social basis of capitalist implicatory denial: the seemingly evidence-proof conviction of capitalist states that capitalogenic climate change can be remedied by means, and according to systems, that guarantee its perpetuation. The capitalocentric purview is commonly, but mistakenly, identified with the anthropocentrism of ancient and medieval monotheisms. Here, however, it is clearly not the Anthropos that stands at the centre, as though appointed by God to steward the garden of Earth. At the centre is the ritual: that unconditional imperative to accumulate. And insofar as this imperative drives ‘adorers’, as Benjamin put it, to the horizon of human extinction, capitalism can – must – be described as a death cult. Fossil capital is but one modality of the death cult, albeit a paragon. The ‘externalities’ of capital – climate chaos, biosphere destruction, resource depletion, topsoil erosion, ocean acidification, mass extinction, the accumulation of chemical, heavy metal, biological and nuclear wastes – extend far beyond the specific catastrophe of a carbonised atmosphere. Capitalism is a comprehensive system of work-energetics. The food industry, which powers waged labour, and is key to the shifting value of labour-power itself, is as central to the deterioration of the biosphere as is fossil-fuelled transit. Nonetheless, the continuing decision for fossil fuels as a solution to the energy demands of capitalist production, for all the growing denial of climate-change denial among the anti-vulgarian ruling class, for all their concerned mouth music, is an exemplary case of the capitalist imperative of competitive accumulation at work. As Andreas Malm has fiercely and beautifully argued, capitalism did not settle for fossil fuels as a solution to energy scarcity. The common assumption that fossil energy is an intrinsically valuable energy resource worth competing over, and fighting wars for is, as geographer Matthew Huber argues, an example of fetishism. At the onset of steam power, water was abundant, and cheaper to use even with its fixed costs, than coal. The hydraulic mammoths powered by water wheels required far less human labour to convert to energy, and were far more energy-efficient. Even today, only a third of the energy in coal is actually converted in the industrial processes dedicated thereto: the only thing that is efficiently produced is carbon dioxide. On such basis, the striving for competitive advantage by capitalists seeking maximum market control ‘should’ have favoured renewable energy. Capital, however, preferred the spatio-temporal profile of stocks due to the internal politics of competitive accumulation. Water use necessitated communal administration, with its perilously collectivist implications. Coal, and later oil, could be transported to urban centres, where workers were acculturated to the work-time of capitalist industry, and hoarded by individual enterprises. This allowed individual units of capital to compete more effectively with one another, secured the political authority of capital and incorporated workers into atomised systems of reproduction, from transport to heating*. Thus, locked in by the short-termist imperatives of competitive accumulation, fossil capital assumed a politically privileged position within an emerging world capitalist ecology. It monopolised the supply of energy for dead labour, albeit in a highly inefficient way. This is the tragedy of the worker. That, as avatar of a class in itself, she was put to work for the accumulation of capital, from capitalism’s youth, amid means of production not of her choosing, and with a telos of ecological catastrophe. That thus even should the proletariat become a class for itself, and even if it does so at a point of history where the full horror of the methods of fossil capitalism is becoming clear, it would – will – inherit productive forces inextricable from mass, trans-species death. This does not preclude systemic, planet-wide transformation. Particularly given the inevitably uneven global growth of class consciousness and resistance, however, and the concomitant embattledness of any reformist, let alone revolutionary, power on the global stage, it does ensure that it faces extraordinary barriers. As will become clear.