Capitalism drives extinction and structural violence.

This is the question that vexed us as we set out to write The Tragedy of the Worker. From the vantage point of the present, the history of capitalist development is, as Marx expected, the history of the development of a global working class, the proletarianisation of the majority of the world’s population. But the very same process of that development has brought us to the precipice of climate disaster. Our position, to recall Trotsky’s rationalisation of War Communism in 1920, is in the highest degree tragic.

It is now clear that we will pass what scientists have long warned will be a tipping point of global warming, accelerating the already catastrophic consequences of capitalist emissions. How do we imagine emancipation on an at best partially habitable planet? Where once communists imagined seizing the means of production, taking the unprecedented capacities of capitalist infrastructures and using them to build a world of plenty, what must we imagine after the apocalypse has befallen us? What does it mean that as capitalism has become truly global, the gravediggers it has created dig not only capitalism’s grave, but also that of much organic life on earth?

Our answers to these questions remain rooted in the politics of revolutionary communism. Our stance is not based on the fantasy of a homeostatic nature that must be defended but on the critique of the capitalist metabolism – the Stoffwechsel- that must be overthrown. Earth scientists are accustomed to speak in terms of ‘cycles’ by which substances circulate in different forms: the water cycle, the rock cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the glacial-interglacial cycle, the carbon cycle, and others. One way of registering the catastrophe of climate change is to see these cycles – most of all, but not solely, the carbon cycle – as disordered, under- or over-accumulating. But this is to ignore the more fundamental circuit of which these now form epicycles, like Ptolemy’s sub-orbits of the heavenly bodies: the circuit of capital accumulation, M-C-M′.

This circuit accumulates profit and produces death. Neither is accidental. It is for this reason that the debates that capitalist ruling classes permit among themselves on ‘adaptation’ versus ‘mitigation’ take place on false premises. What is to be mitigated is the impact of climate change on accumulation, rendered through the ideology of ‘growth’ as something that benefits everyone. What we are to adapt to are the parameters of accumulation, sacrificing just enough islands, eco-systems, indigenous – and non-indigenous – cultures to maintain its imperatives for a period of time until new thresholds must be crossed, and new life sacrificed to the pagan idol of capital. Already, capitalist petro-modernity builds a certain quantum of acceptable death into its predicates: at the very least, the 8.7 million killed by fossil fuels each year according to Harvard University are considered a price worth paying for the stupendous advantages of fossil capital. And the sky can only keep going up, as deforestation, polar melt, ocean acidification, soil de-fertilisation and more intense wildfires and storms tear the web of life into patches. If the necropolitical calculus of the Covid-19 pandemic appears crass, just wait until its premises are applied to climate catastrophe.