Capitalism drives interlocking eco-crises at every level—extinction.

Geo-ecological challenges include the unfolding planetary cataclysms of climate chaos, mass extinction, and the less appreciated cumulative, lasting damage of other inter-related, destructive impacts on ecosystems (Ripple et al. 2017), such as radioactive waste, deforestation, wetland loss, and pollution by persistent organic toxins and heavy metals. These impacts have unforeseen consequences because there are mutually transforming effects at different scales (small areas to the entire planet) occurring between air, water, land, and organisms. For instance, permafrost regions contain about half the world’s subsurface carbon. As it has been disappearing, the soil methane trapped for millennia is being unleashed at much faster rates than expected as subsurface conditions get warmer. The methane is released in part as a result of the greater activity of soil microbes favoured by higher temperatures.

Soil organic matter in permafrost regions is also degrading as it is broken down through the action of soil organisms and chemical reaction with oxygen, such that more carbon dioxide can be released and contribute further to global warming and less carbon can be stored in those former per- mafrost soils (Feng et al. 2020; Kramshøj et al. 2018). The reduction in permafrost alters habitat and vegetation composition so that some land-based organisms need to migrate to other regions in search of food, among other needs, and other organisms (unable to migrate) may die out locally (Richter-Menge, Druckenmiller, and Jeffries 2019; Schuur and Mack 2018). People living in such regions already suffer from the disappearance of some of the food sources on which they relied and must forge new forms of living and travel infrastructure, among other forced changes in life- ways (Crate et al. 2017).

Virtually every ecological region is undergoing some major transformations in result of long- or short-term direct human impacts (e.g. logging leading to deforestation, agrochemicals leading to the disappearance of insect species) and human-induced climate change. Changes in one eco-region affect the status of other eco-regions. For instance, industrialised farming has led to massive transfers of nutrients downstream, creating dead zones near river deltas, such as the mouth of the Mississippi, while hurricanes’ racialised deadly effects (South End Press Collective 2007) have been exacerbated by combined wetland destruction and global warming effects (White et al. 2019). The creation and use of leaded petrol and paint and products releasing or laden with various heavy metals is behind what has become a permanent heavy metals contamination problem in nearly all cities, mines, and other such places, including places downwind and down- stream, bringing lasting hazards to human health and that of most other organisms—hazards that can be at most contained (Alloway 2013; Meuser 2010). Plastics production and use, tightly linked to fossil fuels because they are petroleum by-products, has led to micro-plastics pollution in oceans and lasting deleterious health effects on marine life (Chae and An 2017).

The cumulative effect of these interconnected changes is a radically altered planet that is less and less suitable to many life-forms, including us. But the effects have historically and continue to hit communities with the least eco- logical footprint and political leverage, as a result of social relations of dom- ination at every level. Moreover, the long-term health impacts of environmental degradation are mainly borne by those who are made most responsible for care-work and social reproduction, still overwhelmingly women (Bell 2016; Djoudi et al. 2016; Salleh 2010).

Challenges of Oppressive Relations

This brings us to the social challenges, which also involve many inter-related processes at once. There is the extension to liberal democracies of the subor- dination of national-level political power to unaccountable institutions, like the European Union (EU), North Atlantice Traty Organisation (NATO), or International Monetary Fund (IMF), in conformity with long-standing arrangements familiar to most of the rest of the world (Amin 2006; Böröcz 2018). National states have been more like military enforcement organs for capital accumulation, none more so than in countries under neo-colonial conditions, but with the noteworthy and, among socialists in liberal democracies, often underappreciated exceptions of socialist states and governments. Workplaces have also become more interconnected and geographically dispersed, while work is made ever more intense, sped-up, precarious, and underpaid relative to the total output produced (e.g. steady precipitous drops in real wages; Standing 2014). Automation is even leading to permanent redundancy in some sectors, as computerised machinery replaces human labour.

This global system of pillage for endless capital accumulation cannot exist without multiple forms of social oppression (patriarchal, racist, heteronor- mative) and ecological destruction to ensure that the reproduction of human life supports the profit-making and privileges of the few (Bennholdt- Thomsen and Mies 1999; Bhattacharya 2016; Federici 2012; Salleh 2009). Socially reproductive work not only continues to be unrecognised, but it is simultaneously at odds with and more important than ever to capital accumulation, given worsening employment conditions for most people. Perhaps to state the obvious, there can be no paid workers to produce stuff for sale without the (overwhelmingly unpaid) work needed to give birth and raise and maintain offspring. Yet businesses, collectively, must undermine people’s ability to reproduce human life because total business costs (wages, benefits, taxes for social spending, like education and health) must be lower than total sales revenues (e.g. GDP) for there to be profits (“economic growth”). Single businesses may come and go, but they all partake of and reproduce an ultimately life-destroying tendency. In other words, the ecological and social conditions of human life, and therefore of capital as well, are increasingly undermined by capitalist relations (O’Connor 1988).