It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Speech by Jason Hickel, Professor at ICTA-UAB and Visiting Senior Fellow at LSE, at the 50th Anniversary Congress in Havana. First published at Progressive International.
Thank you to Progressive Internationl for organizing this event, and thank you to our Cuban hosts, who have kept this revolution alive against extraordinary odds. The US blockade against Cuba, like the genocide in Gaza, is a constant reminder of the egregious violence of the imperialist world order and why we must overcome it.
So too is the ecological crisis. Comrades, I do not need to tell you about the severity of the situation we are in. It stares every sane observer in the face. But the dominant analysis of this crisis and what to do about it is woefully inadequate. We call it the Anthropocene, but we must be clear: it is not humans as such that are causing this crisis. Ecological breakdown is being driven by the capitalist economic system, and – like capitalism itself – is strongly characterized by colonial dynamics.
This is clear when it comes to climate change. The countries of the global North are responsible for around 90% of all cumulative emissions in excess of the safe planetary boundary – in other words, the emissions that are driving climate breakdown. By contrast the global South, by which I mean all of Asia, Africa and Latin America, are together responsible for only about 10%, and in fact most global South countries remain within their fair shares of the planetary boundary and have therefore not contributed to the crisis at all.
And yet, the overwhelming majority of the impacts of climate breakdown are set to affect the territories of the global South, and indeed this is already happening. The South suffers 80-90% the economic costs and damages inflicted by climate breakdown, and around 99% of all climate-related deaths. It would be difficult to overstate the scale of this injustice. With present policy, we are headed for around 3 degrees of global warming. At this level some 2 billion people across the tropics will be exposed to extreme heat and substantially increased mortality risk; droughts will destabilize agricultural systems and lead to multi-breadbasket failures; and hundreds of millions of people will be displaced from their homes.
Climate breakdown is a process of atmospheric colonization. The atmosphere is a shared commons, on which all of us depend for our existence, and the core economies have appropriated it for their own enrichment, with devastating consequences for all of life on Earth, which are playing out along colonial lines. For the global South in particular, this crisis is existential and it must be stopped.
But so far our ruling classes are failing to do this. In 2015 the world’s governments agreed to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees or “well below” 2 degrees, while upholding the principle of equity. To achieve this goal, high-income countries, which have extremely high per capita emissions, must achieve extremely rapid decarbonization.
This is not occurring. In fact, at existing rates, even the best-performing high-income countries will take on average more than 200 years to bring emissions to zero, burning their fair-shares of the Paris-compliant carbon budget many times over. Dealing with the climate crisis is not complicated. We know exactly what needs to be done, but we are not doing it. Why? Because of capitalism.
If I wish to get one point across today, it is this: the climate crisis cannot be solved within capitalism, and the sooner we face up to this fact the better. Let me briefly describe what I mean.
The core defining feature of capitalism is that it is fundamentally anti-democratic. Yes, many of us live in democratic political systems, where we get to elect candidates from time to time. But when it comes to the economic system, the system of production, not even the shallowest illusion of democracy is allowed to enter. Production is controlled by capital: large corporations, commercial banks, and the 1% who own the majority of investible assets… they are the ones who determine what to produce and how to use our collective labour and our planet’s resources.
And for capital, the purpose of production is not to meet human needs or achieve social and ecological objectives. Rather, it is to maximize and accumulate profit. That is the overriding objective. So we get perverse patterns of investment: massive investment in producing things like fossil fuels, SUVs, fast fashion, industrial beef, cruise ships and weapons, because these things are highly profitable to capital… but we get chronic underinvestment in necessary things like renewable energy, public transit and regenerative agriculture, because these are much less profitable to capital or not profitable at all. This is a critically important point to grasp. In many cases renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels! But they have much lower profit margins, because they are less conducive to monopoly power. So investment keeps flowing to fossil fuels, even while the world burns.
Relying on capital to deliver an energy transition is a dangerously bad strategy. The only way to deal with this crisis is with public planning. On the one hand, we need massive public investment in renewable energy, public transit and other decarbonization strategies. And this should not just be about derisking private capital – it should be about public production of public goods. To do this, simply issue the national currency to mobilize the productive forces for the necessary objectives, on the basis of need not on the basis of profit.
Now, massive public investment like this could drive inflation if it bumps up against the limits of the national productive capacity. To avoid this problem you need to reduce private demands on the productive forces. First, cut the purchasing power of the rich; and second, introduce credit regulations on commercial banks to limit their investments in ecologically destructive sectors that we want to get rid of anyway: fossil fuels, SUVs, fast fashion, etc.
What this does is it shifts labour and resources away from servicing the interests of capital accumulation and toward achieving socially and ecologically necessary objectives. This is a socialist ecological strategy, and it is the only thing that will save us. Solving the ecological crisis requires achieving democratic control over the means of production. We need to be clear about this fact and begin building now the political movements that are necessary to achieve such a transformation.
Now, it should be obvious to everyone at this point that for the global South, this requires economic sovereignty. You cannot do ecological planning if you do not have sovereign control over your national productive forces! Struggle for national economic liberation is the precondition for ecological transition, and it can be achieved with the steps that my colleagues Ndongo and Fadhel have outlined: industrial policy, regional planning, and progressive delinking from the imperial core.
So that is the horizon. But at the same time we must advance our multilateral bargaining positions. This is what we need to do:
First, we need to push for universal adoption of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. This treaty overcomes the major limitation of the Paris Agreement in that focuses squarely on the objective of scaling down the fossil fuel industry on a binding annual schedule. The objective here is to do this in a fair and just way: rich countries must lead with rapid reductions, global South countries must be guaranteed access to sufficient energy for development, and those that are dependent on fossil fuel exports for foreign currency must be provided with a safe offramp that prevents any economic instability.
Second, global South negotiators must collaborate to demand much faster decarbonization in the global North, consistent with their fair-shares of the remaining carbon budget.
Third, we must demand substantial resource transfers to the global South. Because the global North has devoured most of the carbon budget, it owes compensation to the global South for the additional mitigation costs that this imposes on them. Our research shows that this is set to be $192 trillion between now and 2050, or about 6.4 trillion dollars per year. Conveniently, this amount can be provided by a 3.5% yearly wealth tax targeting the richest 10% in the global North.
Of course, we should be clear about the fact that Western governments will not do any of this voluntarily. And it is not reasonable for us to place our hope in the goodwill of states that have never cared about the interests of the South or the welfare of its people.
The alternative is for global South governments to unite and collectively leverage the specific forms of power that they have in the world system. Western economies are totally dependent on production in the South. In fact, around 50% of all materials consumed in the global North are net-appropriated from the South. This is a travesty of justice but it is also a crucial point of leverage. Global South governments can and should form cartels to force the imperialist states to take more radical action toward decarbonization and climate justice.
And, by the way, speaking of South-South solidarity, global South governments should negotiate access to renewable energy technologies by establishing swap lines with China so that these can be obtained outside of the imperialist currencies, and thus limit their exposure to unequal exchange.
Comrades. We stand at a fork in the road. We can stick with the status quo and watch helplessly as our world burns… or we can unite and set a new course for human history. The Southern struggle for liberation is the true agent of world-historical transformation. The world is waiting. This is the generation. Now is the moment. Hasta la victoria siempre.
Tuesday, April 23, 2024
Borders are now a means of disciplining a global working class
Despite the rhetoric adopted by a range of politicians, there is no ‘immigration crisis’, argues the author of this thoughtful new book. Rather, what we are seeing is the normal functioning of the global economy reaching its logical conclusion. Only an internationalist understanding can tackle the destitution of the Global South that this causes.
Since the 1990s, remittances have become the largest financial flows from the Global North to the South and are now integral to the current phase of international capitalism. Rather than seek alternative state policies to redress the inequalities that are essential to capitalist development, “countries are locked into a model of labour export that separates families, destroys communities and lacks concern for workers’ livelihoods.”
The Philippines alone has over 10 million of its citizens living and working abroad, nearly 10% of its population, a process that began with economic liberalisation which devastated the domestic economy. Likewise Mexico, which had healthy growth rates in the 1970s and 1980s, was forced to accept IMF-imposed privatisations and other neoliberal measures which obliterated livelihoods and led to a mass wave of migration to the north. In 2017 alone, Mexicans abroad sent home a staggering $36 billion. In El Salvador, remittances make up a quarter of GDP.
These sums are not just a lifeline to migrants’ families – they also improve the credit rating of financially desperate countries, which can use them as a strategy to access external loans and lower their borrowing costs, which in turn bolsters the unpopular elites that adopted this devastating strategy.
In the Global North, the growing militarization of borders has been accompanied by increased deportations, detention and denial of rights. In this model, borders serve not to deter migration but to discipline a global working class, in which migrants constitute a vast, low-wage, flexible workforce, exploited to undermine trade unions and make all work more precarious.
Despite the official rhetoric, there is a great deal of state collusion in this process. In Spain, the authorities move irregular migrants to areas where labour is needed. They are routinely paid half the minimum wage and risk deportation if they ‘cause trouble’. The US shows similar patterns in maintaining its cheap agriculture labour.
How to organise against the injustices that migrant workers face, in the context of declining union power? Henaway has a number of ideas, based on his experience as a community organiser at the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal. But he also draws on the struggles of Latin American cleaners in London, African warehouse workers in northern Italy, the Sans Papiers strikes in Paris, and elsewhere.
While there are undoubtedly objective difficulties to achieving success in these struggles, Henaway is keen to emphasise the subjective obstacles they face – in particular the conservative methods and attitudes of much of the left and its traditional organisations.
A lot of the case studies here are from Canada where the author is a long-standing activist. But the conclusions apply far more generally, so this book should be widely read to understand the driving forces behind, and the consequences of, global migration.
Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.
The MST does not only fight for land; it also seeks to enact agrarian reform and transform society… harnessing nature rather than degrading it and producing healthy food for society at large.
Vijay Prashad
On the 40th anniversary of the founding of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), Vijay Prashad of Tricontinental examines the MST’s tactics and organisational methods.
Brazilian landless workers, who live on settlements and encampments of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), gathered roughly 13 tons of food to send to Palestinians in Gaza between October and December 2023. MST cooperatives across the country participated in the solidarity campaign, which included milk from Cooperoeste in Santa Catarina, rice from Terra Livre Cooperative, the Cooperative of Settled Workers of the Porto Alegre Region (Cootap), and Cooperav in Rio Grande do Sul, and corn flour from Terra Conquistada in Ceará. The aid was sent to the Palestinian Agricultural Workers’ Union through the Brazilian Air Force. ‘The Palestinian people, like all the peoples fighting for their sovereignty, need the solidarity actions of other peoples’, said Jane Cabral of the MST national leadership. Indeed, the world must follow the example of Brazil’s landless workers.
Collecting food has only been one aspect of the MST’s solidarity action with the Palestinian people. The other equally important aspect has been about building a consensus in Brazil regarding Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Over the past several decades, the right-wing evangelical movement in Latin America has promoted a pro-Israeli political agenda in Brazil and elsewhere. This movement defends Israel in the hope that it will destroy the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and build the ‘Third Temple’. Under this view, the temple will open the door to the return of Christ, and all non-Christians, including Jews, will be subjected to eternal damnation. Evangelical pastors in Latin America – many of them funded by US-based Christian Zionist groups such as Christians United for Israel – have spread this deeply hateful, anti-human view. This is an important reason why right-wing leaders in the region, including former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and current Argentinian President Javier Milei, are staunch defenders of Israel and the Zionist project. As such, the MST’s mass drive to collect food for Gaza was also a campaign to contest the growth of Christian Zionism in Brazil, advocate for the rights of the Palestinian people, and deepen education about and ties with the Palestinian struggle amongst its base.
The MST, with its nearly two million members, is the largest socio-political movement in Latin America and one of the largest peasant movements in the world. Since it was born forty years ago, in 1984, the MST has grown steadily because of its unique approach to building and maintaining its base among landless workers. Our latest dossier, The Political Organisation of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), examines the theoretical orientation that has enabled the MST to build this remarkable organisation on the terrain of Brazil’s wretched social hierarchies, which are rooted in the legacy of Portuguese colonialism, genocide, slavery, and US-backed military dictatorships. The art for the dossier, which is also featured in this newsletter, was created for the ‘Forty Years of the MST’ call for art organised by the MST, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, ALBA Movements, and the International Peoples’ Assembly. The second monthly bulletin from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s art department will focus on that exhibition; you can subscribe to it here.
The MST has three goals: to fight for land, to fight for agrarian reform, and to transform society. Based on Brazil’s 1988 Constitution, the MST organises landless workers to seize unproductive land and build settlements (assentamentos) and squatters’ encampments (acampamentos). At present, nearly half a million families live on such settlements and have gained legal tenure of the land, where they have built 1,900 peasant associations, 185 cooperatives, and 120 MST-owned agro-industrial sites, with an additional 65,000 families living on encampments and fighting for legal recognition. It is these institutions that produce the goods sent to Palestine. Despite the unequal balance of forces in Brazil, where the capitalist class enforces its rule over the economy and the countryside through domination of the state, the MST has been able to build its strength over the years and currently operates in twenty-four of the country’s twenty-six states. This strength is a product of the MST’s mass base and its organisational methods. As the dossier explains, a crucial aspect of the MST’s organisational theory is the idea that the assentados, the residents of the agrarian reform settlements, must always be in motion. There are seven organisational principles that allow the MST to drive this motion: its autonomy in relation to political parties, churches, governments, and other institutions, for which organisational unity is essential; the training of organisers both to participate in building the organisation and to be disciplined with respect to the decisions of the collective leadership; the importance of study; and the necessity of internationalism.
The MST does not only fight for land; it also seeks to enact agrarian reform and transform society. In other words, it seeks to change the very nature of agrarian capitalism and construct a model of agroecology that develops a balanced and sustainable form of agriculture – one that harnesses nature rather than degrades it and produces healthy food for society at large.
There are now over 2.4 billion people in the world who are food insecure. More and more famines are breaking out, from Sudan to Palestine, often related to conflicts of different kinds. Meanwhile, we are in the midst of the United Nations Decade of Family Farming, which began in 2019 and will close in 2028. The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) calculates that family or small farmers produce a third of the world’s food and up to 80% of the food in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Yet these small and family farmers do not control the land that they till, nor do they have the capital to increase their productivity. As a consequence, many small farmers produce food for the market but not enough to feed their families, leading to an epidemic of hunger amongst millions of small farmers and peasants.
As the FAO notes, ‘The majority of the 600 million farms in the world are small. Farms of less than one hectare account for 70% of all farms but operate only 7% of all agricultural land’. This great inequality in land ownership is at the heart of the work of the MST, as well as organisations around the world such as Mviwata in Tanzania (about whom we will be publishing a dossier later this year) and the All India Kisan Sabha in India (whom we wrote about in our June 2021 dossier, The Farmers’ Revolt in India). It is for good reason that the 16 million-member Kisan Sabha, for instance, joined the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against apartheid Israel in 2017 and why Mviwata, which represents 300,000 peasants, condemned Israel’s genocide of Palestinians at its annual meeting in December 2023. These farmers and peasants know that their task is not only to redistribute land, but to transform society across the world.
In 1968, Thiago de Mello (1926–2022), born in Brazil’s Amazonas, was sent into exile for his criticism of the military dictatorship. He went to Chile, where he befriended Pablo Neruda. Before long, de Mello was again forced to flee a military dictatorship, chased out of Chile because of the 1973 coup against the socialist project led by then President Salvador Allende. De Mello first went to Argentina and then to Europe. It was during this flight, in 1975, that he wrote his classic poem Para os que virão (‘For Those to Come’), the last few lines about the hurt that must be overcome by people who come to fight for social transformation:
It doesn’t matter if it hurts:
it’s time to move forward
hand in hand with those walking in the same direction,
even if it’s a long way off from learning how to conjugate the verb to love.
Above all, it’s time to stop being just the solitary vanguard of ourselves.
It’s about meeting. (The clear truth of our mistakes burns limpid and hard in our chests) It’s about opening the way.
Those who will come will be the people, and they will know themselves by fighting.
It is impossible to conceive of an ecosocialist alternative to the current process of destruction of the natural foundations of life on the planet without taking into account Marx and Engels’s critique of capitalism… But, at the same time, we need to integrate into Marxist thinking the ecological challenges of the 21st century
Michael Löwy
We reproduce an interview with Michael Löwy that appeared on the Verso Blog. While some ecologists remain critical of Marxism and skeptical about how much Marx can offer the environmental movement, Michael Löwy argues that Marx’s writing can help us understand the relationship between nature, capitalism, and wealth formation. Translated by David Fernbach.
Many ecologists are critical of Marx and urge Marxists to abandon the red paradigm and adopt the green one. What are their main arguments?
According to the ecologists, Marx, following in the footsteps of the English economist David Ricardo, attributed the origin of all value and wealth to human labour, neglecting the contribution of nature. This criticism stems from a misunderstanding: Marx uses the theory of labour-value to explain the origin of exchange-value within the capitalist system. On the other hand, nature is involved in the formation of real wealth, which is not exchange-value but use-value. This position is very explicitly articulated in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), a text directed against the ideas of the German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle and his followers:
“Labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use-values (and surely these are what make up material wealth!) as labour. Labour is itself only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labour power”.1
Ecologists accuse Marx and Engels of productivism. Is this accusation justified?
No, insofar as no one denounced the capitalist logic of production for production’s sake, the accumulation of capital, wealth, and commodities as an end in itself, more than Marx did. The very idea of socialism – in contrast to its miserable bureaucratic counterfeits – is that of the production of use-values, goods needed for the satisfaction of human needs. The supreme objective of technical progress, according to Karl Marx, is not the infinite increase of goods (‘having’), but the reduction of the working day and the increase of free time (‘being’).2
However, it is true that Marx and Engels (and even more so later Marxists) are often uncritical of the system of industrial production created by capital and tend to make the ‘development of the productive forces’ the main vector of progress. From this point of view, the ‘canonical’ text is the famous preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), one of Marx’s writings most marked by a certain evolutionism, by the philosophy of progress, by scientism (the model of the natural sciences) and by an unproblematic view of the productive forces:
“At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production […]. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. […] No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed”.3
In this famous passage, the existing productive forces are not called into question, and the only task of the revolution is to abolish the relations of production that have become a ‘fetter’ on their unlimited development.
The following passage from the Grundrisse (the 1857-59 prequel to Capital) is a good example of Marx’s rather too uncritical admiration for the ‘civilising’ work of capitalist production and its brutal instrumentalisation of nature:
“Thus capital creates the bourgeois society, and the universal appropriation of nature as well as of the social bond itself by the members of society. Hence the great civilising influence of capital; its production of a stage of society in comparison to which all earlier ones appear as mere local developments of humanity and as nature-idolatry. For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognised as a power for itself; and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subjugate it under human needs, whether as an object of consumption or as a means of production.“4
This still uncritical view of capitalism’s relationship with nature would be superseded in the years that followed. In fact, Marx’s (and Engels’s) writings on nature should be seen not as a uniform block, but as thought in motion. This is the argument made in a recent book by a young Japanese researcher, Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism. Capitalism, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017): he shows the evolution of Marx’s reflections on the natural environment, in a process of learning, rectification and reformulation of his thought.
Admittedly, on certain questions, there is great continuity in Marx’s writings. This is particularly true of his rejection of the capitalist ‘separation’ between human beings and the land, i.e. nature. Marx was convinced that in primitive societies there existed a kind of unity between producers and the land, and he saw it as one of the important tasks of socialism to re-establish this unity, destroyed by bourgeois society, but on a higher level (negation of the negation). This explains Marx’s interest in pre-modern communities, both in his ecological thinking and in his anthropological study – drawing respectively on Carl Fraas and Franz Maurer, two authors he considered to be ‘unconscious socialists’.
But on most questions about the environment, Saito highlights notable changes. Before Capital (1867), Marx’s writings were rather uncritical of capitalist ‘progress’. This is evident in the Communist Manifesto, which celebrates the ‘subjugation of the forces of nature’ and the ‘clearing of entire continents’ by the bourgeoisie.
The changes begin in 1865-66, when Marx discovered, through the writings of the agricultural chemist Justus von Liebig, the problems of soil depletion and the metabolic breakdown between human societies and nature. This led him, in Volume One of Capital (1867) as well as in the other two unfinished volumes, to take a much more critical view of the damage caused by capitalist ‘progress’.
Thus, in several passages of Capital that concern agriculture, we see the emergence of a genuine ecological problematic and a radical critique of the catastrophes resulting from capitalist productivism. Marx puts forward a kind of theory of the breakdown of the metabolism between human societies and nature resulting from capitalist productivism. The expression ‘Riß des Stoffwechsels’, or ‘metabolic rift’ (literally ‘rift in material exchange’), appears in a passage in chapter 47, ‘The Genesis of Capitalist Ground Rent’, of Volume Three of Capital:
“On the one hand, large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift (unheilbaren Riß) in the interdependent process of social metabolism (Stoffwechsel), a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself”.5
As in most of the examples we will go on to see, Marx’s attention is focused here on agriculture and the problem of soil devastation, but he links this question to a more general principle: the rupture in the system of material exchange (Stoffwechsel) between human societies and the environment, in contradiction with the ‘natural laws’ of life.
The theme of ‘metabolic rift’ is also found in a passage in Volume One of Capital. This is a text in which Marx discusses most explicitly the ravages wrought by capital on the natural environment; a dialectical vision of the contradictions of the ‘progress’ induced by the productive forces then emerges:
“Capitalist production […] disturbs the metabolic interaction (Stoffwechsel) between man and the earth… hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting (dauernder) fertility of the soil. […]”
“Moreover, all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country proceeds from large-scale industry as the background of its development, as in the case of the United States, the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining (untergräbt) the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker”.6
Several aspects are notable in this text: first of all, the idea that progress can be destructive, a ‘progress’ in the deterioration and destruction of the natural environment. Here, the exploitation and degradation of workers and nature are placed in parallel, as the result of the same predatory logic that prevails in the development of capitalist industry and agriculture.
This direct association made by Marx between the exploitation of the proletariat and the exploitation of the soil is a good starting point for thinking about the link between class struggle and the struggle to defend the environment, in a common struggle against the domination of capital.
After the exhaustion of the soil, the other example of ecological catastrophe frequently mentioned by Marx and Engels is the destruction of forests. It appears several times in Capital:
“The development of civilisation and of industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.”7
The two phenomena – the degradation of forests and that of the soil – are closely linked in
How do Marx and Engels define the socialist programme in relation to the natural environment?
The two thinkers often seem to conceive of socialist production as the collective appropriation of the forces and means of production developed by capitalism: once the ‘fetters’ represented by the relations of production, and in particular the relations of ownership, had been abolished, these forces would be able to develop without hindrance. There would thus be a kind of substantial continuity between the capitalist productive apparatus and that of socialism, with socialism involving above all the planned and rational management of the material civilisation created by capital.
For example, in the famous conclusion to the chapter on the primitive accumulation of capital, Marx writes:
“The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it. The centralisation of the means of production and the socialisation of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. […] Capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a natural process, its own negation.”8
Aside from the fatalistic and positivist determinism that characterises it, this passage seems to leave intact, in the socialist perspective, the entire mode of production created ‘alongside and under’ capital, calling into question only the ‘integument’ of private property, which has become ‘incompatible’ with the material wellsprings of production.
However, there are also other writings that take into account the ecological dimension of the socialist programme and open up some interesting avenues. A number of passages in Marx’s writings seem to regard the conservation of the natural environment as a fundamental task of socialism. For example, Volume Three of Capital contrasts the capitalist logic of large-scale agricultural production, based on the exploitation and waste of the forces of the soil, with another logic, socialist in nature: the ‘conscious and rational treatment of the land as permanent communal property, and as the inalienable (unveräußerlichen) condition of for the existence and reproduction of the chain of successive human generations (p. 949)’. Similar reasoning is found a few pages earlier:
“Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries (Nutznießer), and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as boni patres familias.”9
It would not be difficult to find other examples of genuine sensitivity to the question of the natural environment of human activity. The fact remains, however, that Marx and Engels lacked an overall ecological perspective.
While it is true that ecology did not occupy a central place in Marx and Engels’s theoretical and political apparatus – because the ecological crisis was not yet, as it is today, a vital question for humanity – it is no less true that it is impossible to conceive of a critical ecology equal to the contemporary challenges without taking into account Marx’s critique of political economy and his analysis of the breakdown in the metabolism between human societies and nature. An ecology that ignores or scorns Marxism and its critique of commodity fetishism is doomed to be no more than a corrective to the ‘excesses’ of capitalist productivism.
Based on the writings of Marx and Engels, an ecological Marxist movement has developed in the United States, pioneered by John Bellamy Foster, with the participation of Paul Burkett, Brett Clark, Fred Magdoff and several others (and the support of Monthly Review, one of the most important publications of the North American Left), which defines itself as the ‘metabolic rift’ approach. These authors have made a significant contribution to the rediscovery of the ecological dimension in the work of the founders of modern communism, even if their tendency to exaggerate this aspect is open to criticism.
It is impossible to conceive of an ecosocialist alternative to the current process of destruction of the natural foundations of life on the planet without taking into account Marx and Engels’s critique of capitalism, of the blind logic of value, of the brutal subjugation of human beings and nature to the imperatives of capital accumulation. And we cannot envisage a communist future without referring to their proposals: collectivisation of the means of production, production of use-values rather than market values, democratic planning of production and consumption. But, at the same time, we need to integrate into Marxist thinking the ecological challenges of the 21st century: the fight against climate change, the elimination of fossil fuels, the massive reduction of unnecessary production, the development of renewable energies, organic farming instead of the pesticide-based agricultural industry, the recognition of the ecological debt owed to the countries of the South, etc. Marxists of our age must follow the example of Karl Marx: react to the new problems posed by historical change, using the dialectical method.
Notes
Karl Marx, The First International and After (London: Verso, 2010), p. 341. See also Capital, Volume One (London: Penguin, 1976), p. 134: ‘Labour is therefore not the only source of material wealth, i.e. of the use-values it produces. As William Petty says, labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother.’ ↩︎
On the opposition between ‘having’ and ‘being’, see the 1844 Manuscripts, in Karl Marx, Early Writings (London: Penguin, 1975), p. 361: ‘The less you are, the less you give expression to your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the more you store up of your estranged life.’ On free time as the principal foundation of socialism, see Capital Volume Three (London: Penguin 1981), p. 959. ↩︎
Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1974), pp. 409-10. ↩︎
Capital Volume Three, p. 949. The term ‘metabolic rift’ has been popularised by John Foster Bellamy in his important book Marx’s Ecology. Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), pp. 155-67. ↩︎
The current climate crisis emerged out of a specific set of historical and economic factors which have maintained capitalist accumulation and class inequalities to this day. Jason W. Moore, geographer and Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, explains how the development of capitalism fueled European colonialism and Western imperialism, resulting in a novel form of climate destruction.
Transcript
Hi, I’m Talia Baroncelli, and you’re watching theAnalysis.news. I’ll shortly be joined by historian and geographer Jason W. Moore to speak about capitalism’s effect on climate change. If you’d like to support us, and if you’re in a position to donate, you can go to our website, theAnalysis.news, and hit the donate button at the top right corner of the screen. Make sure you get onto our mailing list and like and subscribe to the show wherever you watch the show, be it on YouTube or on podcast streaming services such as Apple or Spotify. See you in a bit with Jason W. Moore.
Joining me now is Jason W. Moore. He’s a historical geographer and professor of sociology at Binghamton University in Upstate New York. He’s also the Coordinator of the World Ecology Research Network and the author of several books, including Anthropocene Or Capitalocene? and A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, which he co-wrote with Raj Patel. Jason, it’s a pleasure to have you. Jason Moore
What a treat to be here today, Talia. Thank you for having me. Talia Baroncelli
I came across your work because a friend of mine gave me this amazing book of yours, which you co-wrote with Raj Patel. I also was going into some of your more academic articles, and your big critique, which I thought was really pertinent, is how you critique this scientific narrative around climate change. Even in the mainstream scientific discourse, when they’re talking about climate change, such as in the IPCC reports, they’ll say that climate change is manmade and that humans are the main culprit to blame for the climate destruction that we’re witnessing.
What you’re saying is something very different, and pinpointing it on just manmade climate change or saying that the conditions we’re living in are simply due to manmade actions is a form of denialism. You’re arguing to go beyond those very binary terms of man and nature. What you’re arguing for is actually an analysis of capitalism and how capitalist systems, structures, and power dynamics are resulting in the climate change that we’re witnessing.
Why don’t you explain what you mean by this form of capitalism and the Capitalocene, and why it’s so important to go beyond our mainstream understanding of manmade climate change? Jason Moore
It’s a fantastic question. Let’s first recognize that we are subject to one of the greatest ideological con jobs in human history, which is to sort out history in terms of what I call, sarcastically, the eternal conflict between man and nature.
We want it to be clear that humanity is not a historical actor. Humans do not build empires. Humans do not build corporations. This is not the work of an abstract man or of man in general. These are the actions of specific groups of human beings who are in corporations, financial systems, and empires. These are the agents that make history. Political parties make history. Churches make history. Humanity does not make history. Humanity does not go about organizing the climate crisis. There’s a confusion indeed that is deliberately cultivated by the bourgeoisie and their ideologues, which is an argument about human nature. Humans did it.
Well, we know who is responsible for the climate crisis, and they have names and addresses, just like those corporate and capitalist actors who are responsible for the slave trade, they have names and addresses. And just like in the era of slavery, they should be expropriated. It’s as simple as that.
The solution to the climate crisis is part of this argument about the Capitalocene, that we live not in the age of man, the Anthropocene, but in the age of capital, the Capitalocene. The argument is that the source of the problem has definite historical origins in specific times and places, especially in the centuries after Columbus, long before the steam engine came along by the way. It creates a particular set of geo, cultural, economic, and political relations that are always with and within the web of life.
Capitalism did not start transforming the climate with the steam engine. Capitalism and the imperialist agencies responsible for the conquest of the Americas started the climate crisis, and it was evident as early as the long, cold 17th century, roughly from the middle of the 1500s to the year 1700. Why?
In the limitless thirst for cheap labor, the imperialist forces decimated new world populations. The forest grew back. The soils were left undisturbed. There was a drawdown of carbon dioxide which contributed to the greatest crisis that capitalism, to that point, had faced. It was planetary. It wasn’t limited to Europe. This was the era in which capitalism as a world ecology, not as an economic system narrowly conceived, but as a world ecology of power, profit, and life, come together in those centuries during this first great climate crisis, this capitalogenic climate crisis, at least in part. We see the crystallization of capitalism as a trinity, what I call the climate class divide, climate apartheid, and climate patriarchy. This was a response to the crises, the climate class conjuncture of that era, and it is still very much with us today.
We have to, first and foremost, name the system. Otherwise, we are denying climate change in the more real historical sense of who is responsible. We’re saying with the CEO of ExxonMobil, yes, climate change is real, and we all need to join together to solve the problem. Talia Baroncelli
Well, you’re trying to infuse a historical perspective into this analysis of climate change. What would you say to people who argue that there were instances of different societies having an impact on the climate, even, say, in the 1200s, for example? In the medieval period, when there was actually, I wouldn’t say, global warming, but there was a bit of a warm period, and there was some affluence that came along with that, as well as increases in the population. Because of the feudal system, more people were put to work in the feudal system under the lords. But then, when there was a cooling. As a result, there was a more vulnerable population that was more vulnerable to health crises.
A lot of people ended up dying when the Black Plague came along. In 1347, because there were still trade networks between Europe and Asia, once the Black Plague hit Europe, a lot of people, a lot of workers or peasants ended up dying. Then, we see the peasant uprisings of the late 1300s and the 1400s that led to the undermining of the feudal system.
How would you say that particular moment is different from what we’re experiencing now? Is it a different critical juncture? Why would those impacts on the environment be different from the way you’re characterizing the Capitalocene in the modern day? Jason Moore
Well, it’s another fantastic question. I’ve written quite a bit about this over the past 25 years, and people can go to my website, jasonwmoore.com, and look into these discussions. Yes, indeed, the crisis of feudalism was a climate class conjuncture, a socio-physical conjuncture, if you will. It was not the climate shift from the medieval climate anomaly, sometimes called the medieval warm period, because in Europe it was warm; that provided very favorable conditions for the emergence of feudalism and the assertion of feudal power, the encagement of the peasantry, as Christopher Wickham summarizes it. This was fundamental to the golden age of feudalism. You think of knights, the castles, and the cathedrals. When the climate shifted, it transformed everything in that civilization’s DNA. The same thing is going on today.
Here’s the most important takeaway from that story. First of all, it’s not a Malthusian story. It’s not too many people on the land, leading to famine and disease and all this. That is a straight-up ideological falsification. It was very much a Marxist struggle and contradiction of the climatological and other biological and ecological conditions of feudal power that was coming unraveled at the moment of this shift from a warm era that had endured either two and a half, three centuries, or possibly even longer, depending on how we want to look at it, to a very unfavorable climatic situation.
I like to say climate change is not everything. But if we want to understand anything about our political conjuncture today, we have to understand the climate crisis. The same is true for these previous moments, even though they weren’t nearly so dramatic. There were climate shifts within the climate stability of the Holocene. That long era from 11,700 years ago to the present is now over or close to being over.
The key takeaway is that these unfavorable shifts in the climate, unfavorable to large-scale class-dominated agriculture, were bad for the ruling classes. This is true for the feudal ruling classes in the 14th century. It was true for the ruling classes of Western Rome a thousand years earlier when we saw the onset of what science has called the Dark Ages Cold Period. It was true for what’s called the Bronze Age collapse, where a period of sustained drought, along with other factors, led to the near-simultaneous collapse of most of the major Bronze Age civilizations right around the year 1200 BCE. There’s a long history to this.
Lo and behold, the same pattern repeats itself in the history of capitalism. People don’t pay any attention to this, and as a consequence, they overstate the resilience of the ruling classes. The ruling classes today are not in a good position, and climate history tells us a lot about why that is.
As I mentioned in the previous question, the long, cold 17th century was one of the coldest periods of the past 8,000 years. This was an era of profound revolt. It’s an era that ends with civil wars and revolutions.
Oliver Cromwell in England has cut off the head of the king and is then facing the prospect of a Communist, or as they said at the time, a Communist army, the Levellers, outside of London. He was trying to figure out what to do with this. We can’t have a Communist revolution. This dynamic repeats itself again and again in the era of the French Revolution and Malthus. This was the last great cold stretch of the Little Ice Age between 1783 and 1820. This was the era of the Haitian Revolution, of the revolt in Ireland in 1798, of the English fleet mutiny in the 1790s. This was an era of profound revolution and revolt. So again, in an era of very unfavorable climate. This should give us pause to reject both the climate doomism and, I think, the climate resignation, this sense of powerlessness in the present conjuncture. These moments of unfavorable climate change are wrapped up with periods of popular revolt and the unraveling of the underlying conditions for ruling class power especially, but not only in agriculture.
The ideological terrain has been dominated by neo-Malthusians. We don’t understand that, ultimately, the source of bourgeois legitimacy is their ability to maintain a cheap food regime so people can gain access to cheap food. That’s obviously an issue in the present moment. There are many intervening factors, but it has to be front and center in our imagination that climate is, amongst others, a weak link in the imperialist chain of power. Talia Baroncelli
We’ll definitely get into how your analysis of capitalism, the Capitalocene, and world ecology can potentially be useful to revolutionary struggles as well as to the climate movement. You did bring up the issue of cheapening nature. This is something that you discuss, along with Raj Patel in your book, on that topic.
I think it was really interesting how you brought up the historical example of the island of Madeira. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this was in the mid-1400s when the Portuguese went to Madeira. They were so taken by the idea of making sugar or producing sugar that they went to the island. They cleared the island of all the forestry that was there because, for every pound of sugar, they would need to burn something like 50 pounds of wood to distill the sugar and get to it. Distill the sugarcane, rather.
You use this example of what took place on the island to illustrate the seven ways in which nature is cheapened. You speak about how capitalism cheapens nature. It takes things that are essentially undenominable, or it transforms them into relations of production and consumption in ways that perhaps didn’t exist previous to that. It’s not just making the cost of things cheaper but also reducing the integrity or the value. It is also reducing people or Indigenous people to being cheap, essentially, or women and other marginalized groups, for example, and how that relates to nature and cheap goods and energy. Maybe we could get into that historical example as well, the example of Madeira and how cheapening nature and these seven cheap things that you mentioned with Raj Patel are so important to understand the perspective you’re getting at in world ecology. Jason Moore
Absolutely. When we think about the rise of capitalism and the extension of the formal colonial empire, which is modern imperialism, today, people talk about colonialism and don’t have any sense of what that is.
Colonialism, as a formal expression of imperialism, is how the bourgeoisie prefers to wage the class struggle. That is at the core of my theory of cheap nature. This expansion was because, under the conditions of the feudal crisis, the seigneurs and the aristocrats were defeated. They lost the class struggle. You mentioned the popular revolt. The peasants and workers everywhere across Europe prevented the restoration of feudalism.
To make a very long and complex story very short, they essentially forced the bankers, the kings and queens, and the seigneurs to find a solution overseas, where the overwhelming military power of the new capitalist states gave them a decisive advantage. Be mindful, they didn’t go to Africa, they didn’t go to India, they didn’t go to China because they would have lost. They went to the Americas where decisive military power allowed them to create the conditions for a good business environment.
Cheap nature has two moments, and you nailed it. It is both cheap in price for the capitalist. It’s not the $3 hamburger. It is the $10 barrel of oil. It is commodity prices. It is the cost of doing business for capital. Cheap nature is a strategy to create other cheapened moments.
Now, the second moment of cheap nature is geo-cultural devaluation. This gives rise to specific forms of proletarianization that are today talked about in very abstract and incorrect language, like women and Indigenous peoples, as if the whole point was not to create indigeneity, to create man/woman as a binary, to create racial categories in order to cheapen the labor. These are cultural expressions of the worldwide class struggle.
Why was it that capitalism needed to invent, for instance, a new binarized gender division of labor? Because it needed cheap workers. The only people who can produce cheap workers are females. So that was fundamental to the emergence, the invention of climate patriarchy, of climate apartheid, out of the raw material of what I think is the most dangerous word in the language, nature.
The book is titled Seven Cheap Things. But in fact, very quickly, we say, look, there aren’t really seven cheap things because nature is a specific cultural and political mechanism to make other relations into things and make them cheap. Cheap nature puts these two moments together. Everybody pays lip service today around intersectionality, but they never bother to put them together historically. That is the exploitation of labor power and the domination through nature, the domination of the web of life, and various forms of naturalized domination like racism and sexism. These are all intimately tied in this account. This allows us to begin to understand what is at the core of the climate crisis. And what is at the core of the climate crisis is not European white men doing bad things to landscapes. It is about the drive to find cheap labor, because without cheap labor, you can’t do anything to the rest of the web of life. You can’t turn the rest of life into a cash machine without cheap labor. And that’s more than just wage workers. It is, as I’ve been arguing, my comrades, and the World Ecology Conversation, have been arguing for over a decade. Capitalism is a system of unpaid work. It thrives when there are small pockets of market exchange of the cash nexus within oceans of cheap or potentially cheap nature, at the center of which is labor. We’re always looking at how labor is cheapened through these ideological dynamics.
I would close with a nice sound bite that I take from the great German Marxist feminist Claudia von Werlhof. She says, “Nature is everything the bourgeoisie does not want to pay for.” If you stop and think about it, that applies to racism and it applies to sexism. It applies to the whole dynamic of what economists, in a rather banal way, talk about as externalization.
We have to begin to pierce the ideological con job of this eternal conflict between man versus nature and begin to understand this is a dynamic of class struggle in the web of life. That’s an old-fashioned way of putting a very, very concrete reality here. This is not a struggle of Europe against indigenous peoples. This is the emergence of a capitalist class structure committed to an absurdity, the endless accumulation of capital, and therefore, the endless conquest of the earth, as in the story of Madeira, where one frontier gives right away to another, to another, to another, where the frontiers fix the problems of capitalism or fix the problems of the Iberian states in the era of feudal crisis. Talia Baroncelli
Yeah, just touching on the unpaid aspect of labor. Silvia Federici would also speak about the importance of reproductive labor and how that form of unpaid labor is so crucial to upholding very specific capitalist relations.
Going back to the Madeira example, what happened on the island was that the island was completely deforested, and they had to shift the sugarcane production to, I believe it was wine or something else. It seems like once that happened, the people who owned the modes of production then required other frontiers to expand their relations and to continue to profit off of those other sites of power that you could potentially call them. They needed to go to what they termed the New World, to the Americas, to look for more land there and to have a cheaper labor force that they brought from Africa to then exploit and appropriate energy. Jason Moore
There’s an ongoing frontier, a restless frontier that is at the core of capitalism. There’s no capitalism without frontiers. We know this today because capitalism is in its zombie phase. It is dead. Its underlying inner sources of animism and vitality are gone. Those are frontiers. Frontiers of what? Of cheap labor, food, energy, raw materials, anything that’s fundamental to capital accumulation. The role of imperialism is to secure cheap nature frontiers. Today, those frontiers are gone. What’s the role of imperialism? Well, we’re seeing it right before our eyes. Talia Baroncelli
Would you say that your argument is similar to what David Harvey would be speaking about, the spatial-temporal fix in which, due to crises of over-accumulation, capital always seeks other areas beyond other frontiers, for example, to continue to accumulate? Then, once there’s nothing else, no other frontiers, you see these crises boiling over even within what we would consider the Global North, for example, not just in places such as the Global South. Jason Moore
Yes and no. David Harvey is a comrade and a teacher of mine. I’m very much in that intellectual lineage rather directly. Harvey is brilliant. What you just summarized is not Harvey’s position. Harvey has stated many times that capitalism does not need frontiers of cheap labor, energy, food, and raw materials to survive, that it can cannibalize itself in some version of Nancy Fraser’s argument. This is provided without any historical examination of the real historical conditions through which capitalism has resolved its great accumulation crises.
If you look at history, say, classically at the end of the 19th century, but also in the middle of the 16th century, the Great Depressions were resolved through new ways of imperialism, the securing of new frontiers, especially these four cheaps of labor, food, energy, and raw materials, to fix the over-accumulation problem. That is, the problem where there’s too much capital and not enough profitable investment opportunities.
Harvey went part of the way, and in fact, in his most important work that nobody reads but go read, Limits to Capital from 1982, he says, look, right around the early 20th century, and Luxemburg put her finger on it at that moment, there was a sea change in capitalism, the closure of the frontiers, and then what he calls the law of rising geographical inertia.
Now, interestingly, nobody, I think, except for me, has ever picked up on that. But that means, essentially, there was an intimate connection between capitalism’s famous flexibility and capacity for innovation and its capacity to secure frontiers.
Lo and behold, if we look at the past 50 years, and this is part of my thesis on zombie capitalism, in the productive center, the heart of capitalism, we see long-run productivity stagnation. We see a long-run agricultural productivity stagnation at the very moment when the last meaningful frontiers have been enclosed. Yes, there are frontier spaces in Borneo, Sumatra, in the Amazon, here and there, for sure. But these are no longer or even remotely close to promising to restore the conditions for a new golden age of capitalism, such as existed at previous moments of restructuring. In this long historical cycle of imperialism, frontiers, the acquisition, appropriation of new cheap natures, resolving the crisis, and then, of course, there’s another crisis, another century or so ahead. That’s a story that I tell in Capitalism in the Web of Life and in many, many essays. It’s important to remember those frontiers are now gone. I just have to mention that it’s related to waste frontiers, foremost among them, the atmosphere as a great waste frontier for greenhouse gasses.
Part of what we see in the history of capitalism is that for every moment of externalizing waste and polluting and toxifying the world, for every moment of waste, there’s a complementary moment of laying waste. That’s what we’re seeing in the world today. We’re seeing in the world today the end of capitalism, a climate crisis that is inducing a shift towards geopolitical accumulation, using political and military power to secure the best deal for different capitalist classes in different imperial centers of the world. Talia Baroncelli
Well, the waste thing is quite a big issue. I think it was in one of your books where you mentioned that by 2050, there’ll probably be more plastic in the oceans than fish. That’s an example of where all the [crosstalk 00:28:54]. Jason Moore
And that was optimistic. Talia Baroncelli
That was an optimistic estimate because that was probably in 2017 that you wrote that. Jason W. Moore, it’s been really great to speak to you. Thanks so much for your time. Let’s talk again soon. Jason Moore
Talia, it has been a pleasure. Thank you for such a lively conversation. For those who are interested in anything that I’ve just said, you can go to my website, jasonwmoore.com. Talia Baroncelli
You’ve just been watching part one of my discussion with Jason W. Moore. In part two, we get to some of the strategies that can be deployed by movements to unseat capitalism and the consolidation of the elite power. Thanks for watching.
The Assertion of Popular Power: A Climate Movement Imperative
In part 2, historian and geographer Jason W. Moore explains why climate and revolutionary struggles must understand capitalist dynamics and deploy a language of universal class solidarity to overthrow transnational power structures perpetuating the climate crisis.
Hi, I’m Talia Baroncelli, and you’re watching theAnalysis.news. This is part two of my lively discussion with historian Jason W. Moore. If you’d like to support this content and the work that we do, you can go to our website, theAnalysis.news, and hit the donate button at the top right corner of the screen. Don’t forget to get onto our mailing list; that way, you’re always up to date every time there’s a new episode. Like and subscribe to the show on podcast streaming services such as Apple or Spotify, as well as on our YouTube channel, and please share the show if you enjoy this content. See you in a bit with Jason.
Joining me now is Jason W. Moore. He’s a historical geographer and professor of sociology at Binghamton University in Upstate, New York. He’s also the Coordinator of the World Ecology Research Network and is author of several books, including Anthropocene or Capitalocene? as well as A History of the World and Seven Cheap Things, which he co-wrote with Raj Patel. Jason, it’s a pleasure to have you.
Jason W. Moore
Well, it is a treat to be here today, Talia. Thank you for having me.
Talia Baroncelli
I’m sure there are some people listening who are thinking, so what? What does this all mean? Why is any of this relevant to have different perspectives or to not focus on this man-made binary with nature? I think if you want to put this analysis into practice, then you have to look at how relevant this could be for the climate struggle.
What would you say to that for revolutionary struggles or for climate movements such as, well, there are several, I’m thinking even Debt-for-Nature or movements which argue for the cancelation of debt, for example, or for other climate groups as well. How important is this adaptation of the language and the perspective that you’re deploying? How important is that for their struggles to be even more effective, or is it more of a linguistic issue?
Jason W. Moore
Yeah, well, of course, it’s not. It isn’t linguistic because language is a crucial nexus of power. I always love it when Marxists who should be committed to the critique of ideology are like, “Oh, that’s just changing the words around.” It’s clearly not. The analysis of the weak links of capitalism that proceeds from man versus nature leads to forms of neo-Malthusian techno-scientific authoritarianism. This is profoundly and thoroughly anti-democratic.
From the origins of second-wave environmentalism, I think of the first Earth Day in 1970, the first UN Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. From there onwards, the main ideological message has been listen to the science. Trust us. Give power to the experts. This is fundamentally anti-democratic.
Here, I agree entirely with Naomi Klein about the climate crisis, who basically says, echoing ’60s radicals, “The issue is not the issue.” The issue of the climate crisis is an issue of democracy. It is a crisis of democracy. Therefore, the first step has to be the assertion of popular power over the political structures of the world and to confront the oligarchies, the national security states, and the imperial apparatus in the case of the United States and a few other countries that are fundamentally about the dictatorship of capital.
We should stop pussy-footing around the issue with the illusion that somehow, if only we elect enough social Democrats to parliament, they will legislate socialism, and the climate crisis will go away. That’s not how it’s going to work.
The history of the 20th century, which eco-socialists routinely ignore, is a history of counter-insurgency and regime change politics. It’s baffling to me that folks want to devolve into single-issue politics. Single-issue politics really emerged out of the crisis of Fordism in the 1960s. It was an invention of the new right and then was picked up by elements of a centrist, liberal, professional managerial class strategy. Environmentalism was one of the major ones, not just in the U.S. but in Western Europe.
The result is something like, well, you’re in Berlin now, if I remember right, something like what you see with the German Greens. The German Greens love war. They love war. Look at the civilizational rhetoric coming out of the Greens and the warmongers in Germany right now, which is in the midst of the greatest rearmament since 1936. What could go wrong? Then, we begin to hear that old language of the Civilizing Project. The Russians might look like us, but they’re not us. They don’t value life. Josep Borrell, the E.U.’s Chief Diplomat, is saying, “Well, Europe is the garden, and the rest of the world is the jungle.” Yeah, exactly. This is exactly…
We talk about language. Ideological power flows through language and flows through the power to name. Most so-called radicals around the climate are not saying the problem is capitalism and not just capitalism as some system of corporate power. Yes, corporations, but also the increasingly tight nexus of the bourgeoisie and its political representatives, which is spectacularly advanced or degenerated, as the case may be in the United States, but clear in the U.K. and many other places. The left has been completely destroyed. The proletarian forces have been defeated across the Global North. In the Global South, you see the semi-proletariat organizing, but in very ideologically confused ways.
What’s necessary is clarity, a historical clarity, over the actual dynamics of capitalism in the web of life. And that means that we need a new conceptual apparatus that does involve a different linguistic turn. Let me point out that you understand this, Talia, but some of these idiots in the eco-socialist crowd say, “Well, it’s just language.” Every liberation movement in the modern world ever has insisted on a new language. Why? Because the language of the dominating and exploiting classes is one designed to keep people down. And that’s only intensified in the era of social media and misinformation fetishes and all of that.
Talia Baroncelli
Right. And all knowledge production is a representation of those power relations and inequalities that these movements are also trying to undermine.
Jason W. Moore
Absolutely.
Talia Baroncelli
The language is important. But you bring me to my next question then, and I think [Antonio] Gramsci, the Italian thinker and writer, would be really important to bring in at this particular moment. I think it was in 1919, after the April strike, and after he was maybe a bit pessimistic over how the workers’ councils were failing in a way. He wrote more about hegemony and how the issue is perhaps within the mindset of the proletariat or the working classes themselves because the hegemonic values of the bourgeoisie have been inculcated into the mass consciousness of the proletariat. There needs to be a shift in their way of thinking and way of viewing the world.
It sounds to me like you would still view that argument as being extremely pertinent right now, that there still has to be an ideological shift in order for these various climate movements that are so multifaceted, multiracial, and multinational to rise up and form a counter-hegemonic force.
Jason W. Moore
Now, right now, they can’t because they have fetishized nation, they have fetishized race, they have fetishized colonialism. They have fetishized, and therefore, all of these and more. To first lay out all the differences between, if you will, the workers of the world or the world’s semi-proletarians, we have to confront that head-on.
We have to understand that what people are embracing under the sign of decolonize everything and intersectionality is, in fact, a subaltern, if you will, expression of the bourgeois strategy to divide and conquer.
Talia Baroncelli
To break up solidarity, essentially.
Jason W. Moore
Exactly. You want to say, okay, if you’re white, you go over here. If you’re Black, you go over here. If you’re a woman here, a man here, straight here, queer here. All of this is embedded in, say, some of these absurd ideas that circulate within the academy, for instance, of the privilege walk, and of progressive stacking. It is designed to set workers against each other because, of course, there are more of us than there are of them, them being not European white men but the 1%: the owners of capital and the owners and possessors of the means of violence and destruction.
That’s a fairly simple notion, but I would say you invoke Gramsci, and I especially love the historicization of this in 1919 by Gramsci and [Vladimir] Lenin. Let’s remember that Gramsci was a Communist, a class struggle Communist, and a Leninist. What happened in the 1980s and ’90s is all of these professors discovered Gramsci and others that they could turn into professional managerial class toys or puppets, like hand puppets. They could cosplay being revolutionary without having to deal with the excruciating political conjuncture of that moment in 1919, when Lenin, Gramsci, and many others understood the proletarian revolution had been beaten back and defeated in Germany and many other places. Of course, the consequence of that was the rise of [Benito] Mussolini and [Adolf] Hitler.
Talia Baroncelli
Lenin was in prison for many years.
Jason W. Moore
Yes. Of course, Gramsci was put into prison, which is a good reminder: look, if you’re going to organize to take away the wealth and power of the 1%, be ready because they’re not playing around. They’re going to put you in jail. They’re going to kill you. They’re going to send the death squads and the drones. They’re going to dump Agent Orange on you. They’re going to do whatever they need to do to prevent your movement from gaining wealth and from redistributing what is, in the bourgeoisie’s view, their wealth and power. Of course, we understand the sources of all wealth are humans and the rest of nature, as Marx reminds us.
But in 1919, as Gramsci and Lenin were dealing with this problem, Lenin began a famous turn towards national liberation movements. He begins to understand, and this comes together in the famous Baku conference of 1921, that the Archimedean lever of the world-class struggle was in the third world, in the colonial world at the time, in the Global South. This was the Archimedean lever of worldwide class struggle. It wasn’t some simplistic, naive, social democratic workerism. Remember, the Socialists all voted for war in 1914.
We want to understand that history as we look at the present moment and begin to identify a working class as an agent of history that is not the old Eurocentric, economistic, formalist working class. It is what I have argued for: a planetary proletariat, a proletariat, biotariat, and femetariat, unifying paid labor with unpaid work of women, nature, and colonies. Not as a typology, but we are all biotarians now. We are all femetarians. We are all enmeshed in this web of cooperation and proletarian solidarity, at least potentially, but we’ll have to rebuild because the neoliberal ruling classes have really defeated the working classes and also convinced many leftists that they shouldn’t want state power. I see this all the time in the North American Academy. North academics love Indigenous peoples as long as they don’t take power.
Talia Baroncelli
Yeah, just do land acknowledgments, and it is fine.
Jason W. Moore
Yeah, let’s do that, or we could say land acknowledgment and decolonize this. When Evo Morales takes power, they’re like, “Oh, no, we can’t have that.” And what they say is, look, first of all, building socialism is not that easy. And second of all, there’s one group in the world that knows socialism works and that’s the bourgeoisie. They know that socialism works, so they sabotage it, and they impose sanctions. At the heart of it, this goes back to Lenin and Gramsci’s point, at the heart of it, from the standpoint of empire, they don’t care about communism or not. They don’t care what you call your state. What they fear is an independent third world or an independent Global South. That’s why the Americans hated the Soviets. It wasn’t about communism. It was that the Soviets sat on all of that wealth, power, oil, and everything else, and they couldn’t be overthrown until the end of the ’80s when they were overthrown.
Talia Baroncelli
When you speak about the 1% and corporate elite, and if you’re looking at climate movements and young people who are so fed up with power and resources being consolidated in a very specific, narrow corporate class that supports big oil and gas and is also supported by big oil and gas because of all the lobbies, how do you unseat that consolidation of power? Because you could have all the climate movements in the world, but if you have this corporate class that has adopted this form of green capitalism as well as this neoliberal green capitalism of, yeah, we’ll invest in carbon capture and storage and enhance oil recovery to make it look like big oil and gas is cutting emissions and are on the side of the young people. They’re shifting. They have their ecological solutions that aren’t really solutions. I guess there are probably two aspects of that. The language is incredibly important, as you mentioned, but how do we actually unseat those centers of power?
Jason W. Moore
Well, first, we have to have clarity of analysis. What’s often called green capitalism, and your summary is excellent, is, in fact, a post-capitalist strategy for a civilization based on political accumulation. That is one in which there are many of the accoutrements we would associate with capitalism, but it’s fundamentally governed by a political dynamic. I call this the ‘too big to fail dynamic’ out of the phrase that came to fame in the Great Recession, where the big financial institutions were, “Too Big to Fail.” Obama comes in, he bails out the criminal banksters and puts six and a half million people out on the streets. That’s political accumulation. That’s not a very common occurrence in the history of capitalism, but increasingly so because the masters of mankind, to borrow Adam Smith’s phrase, understand that their grasp on wealth and power depends on politics, on controlling the states and controlling the military and repressive apparatus. Also, the surveillance apparatus, which, as we know, is quite advanced in the U.S. with the very, very tight relationships, really enmeshed, interpenetrating relationships between Silicon Valley capital and the national security state. This has all come out with the Twitter Files and many other reports in recent years.
Talia Baroncelli
With police as well, it seems like the police have some money and funds where they can buy all sorts of surveillance tech.
Jason W. Moore
That’s exactly right. We’ve witnessed not only the massive growth of a surveillance economy but also what David Gordon and Sam Bowles once called the garrison economy, the growth of the guards, the prisons, the police, and everything else.
There’s, I think, a lot of… confusion is the nicest way to put it when we come to these climate justice movements. By and large, they refuse to identify capitalism, and they talk about it as if it’s a system of corporate power. No, it’s a system of class power in which the reproduction of ruling class power depends on what? The control over the state. Yes, they have an ideological apparatus. Yes, there are hegemonic and counter-hegemonic struggles. But what happened in the 1980s and ’90s is that academics said, “Well, we’re going to talk about counter-hegemony.” Like that’s all about civil society, forgetting or closing their eyes to the reality.
Civil society was an invention of what was called, in 1968, the Cultural Cold War. This very, very intimate connection between what we now call the non-profit industrial sector and cultural counter-insurgency worldwide. This has given rise more recently to what we call Color Revolutions, where you have CIA cut-outs like the National Endowment for Democracy actively overthrowing, as in Ukraine in 2014, the democratically constituted government. There are many other examples we could provide. But there’s this sense of like, oh, we’re just going to resist, and then somehow the resistance is going to translate into pressure politics that will convince capitalists to give up their wealth and power. This is the Greta Thunberg strategy. And by the way, she’s not new. There’s an exact parallel from 1992, around Rio, with Severn Suzuki, the child of one of Canada’s greatest environmentalists, as I’m sure you know. This is very common. We’re going to talk, we’re going to use all this woke language, but we’re not going to name the centerpieces of the coherent and cohering mechanisms of capitalist class power.
Also, to understand, people are going to say that I’m wrong, but capitalism is dead. Capitalism is in its zombie phase. It’s still moving around. It’s still deadly. But the ways that it has for five centuries overcome its crises no longer exist. Those frontiers of cheap nature are no longer there, but also the frontiers of cheap waste are now gone. What does that mean? Here’s a great example: climate change has already suppressed agricultural productivity. Fully eight years of productivity loss have been recorded. So far, according to the OECD, the 24-member Country Member Club of Rich or Semi-rich Countries, agriculture will absorb half of all the costs of climate change. That’s fundamental because the whole apparatus of capitalism of expelling labor from the countryside rests on agricultural revolutions. Those days are over. Climate-smart agriculture is not going to rescue anything.
Once we begin to develop clarity, then the answer becomes an old-fashioned answer. It’s necessary for the popular forces to seize state power and maintain it at all costs. We know that violence ensues after that, but we also know the violence that ensues from failure. I think of the U.S. interventions, the death squad imperialism in El Salvador in the 1980s, the consequence of the failure or the defeat, rather, of the proletarian forces, the FMLN, in that struggle has led to this dystopian prison industrial hellscape that is El Salvador today. You think that the struggle is indeed worth it. It’s not going to come from just resisting. We saw this with Occupy. You have to have politics.
Talia Baroncelli
What if it’s essentially grassroots? To me, it sounds like you’re saying that these different Indigenous movements, for example, and I think there was something recently in Colombia, even, where they were taking back some of the land and having maybe different councils of how to manage that land. Would you say that that’s not revolutionary enough? Because you’re saying that people need to take [crosstalk 00:21:59]
Jason W. Moore
I would say those are defensive strategies. Defensive strategies, of course, are the order of the day, given still the worldwide political balance of class forces. That’s inevitable. We will have many defensive struggles. They are called resistance struggles. They should be defended. The problem is they don’t meet my criteria for revolutionary action. The criteria is, is this part of a strategy to actually take power and take power away from the bourgeoisie. We know the long and violent history of soft power, hard power, economic hitmen, death squads, and regime change, training the militaries to take power, engage in, and stay in terrorism like the U.S. with contras in Nicaragua. We know what’s coming. This is not going to be a surprise. The ruling class is not going to be somehow convinced.
You mentioned Columbia. Of course, Columbia has long been known as the most dictatorial so-called democracy in the Americas. Twice, FARC has laid down its arms, and twice, what happened? They came back and made them pay for it. I don’t think they’re laying down its arms again. This has to be done in terms of a Gramscian strategy. Gramsci was not like we don’t need to be ready to cede state power; we need to indeed identify, as Marx would say, the rich totality, the rich diversity of struggles, and look for their common threads, and then look for the weak links in the imperialist chains of power. Because, of course, taking state power is not enough.
Look at Venezuela, subject to basically constant sanctions and regime change politics, soft power, color revolution, and mercenaries, undoubtedly financed through the CIA Black Budget coming in. This is the dynamic of our times. I worry that a lot of these resistance struggles… the indigenous peoples in Colombia, they know what this is like. I’m not saying they don’t know what the front lines are, but if you look at what the politics are of social democratic academics and other professionals in the Global North, there is a complete memory holding of all of this history.
Talia Baroncelli
Right.
Jason W. Moore
Including in the United States. It’s absurd in the United States where, I mean, for Christ’s sake, the National Security State killed or had Martin Luther King killed.
Talia Baroncelli
Yeah, of course.
Jason W. Moore
This is not a conspiracy theory. This is like out in a day; this has been reported for three decades, actually, going back to the ’70s. We need to be engaged in defensive struggles. They need to be linked to serious multiracial, anti-imperialist, feminist working-class politics. Otherwise, you end up with a rolling series of resistance movements. You have Occupy here. You have the No D’appel over there. You have all of these isolated struggles that don’t ever congeal into actual politics, or they subordinate themselves to social democratic politics. You know this, as you mentioned, growing up in Toronto. You know this from the New Democratic Party. The New Democratic Party never misses an opportunity to move to the right. This is the case for Social Democrats across the world for the past, well, for the past forever.
Talia Baroncelli
Yeah, that’s also taking place right now in Germany, where the AfD has come to power in certain parts of the country. The Social Democrats started instituting more right-wing policies to try to take back those voters who then went over to the AfD. But it doesn’t work that way. That’s not how you’re going to get people back. You increase your electorate, if you actually have the right left policies that will enable workers to have some better standard of living, rights, and to redistribute resources, and not just, oh, we’re going to have anti-migrant policies.
Jason W. Moore
The liberal diagnosis of the problem is white supremacy.
Talia Baroncelli
Right.
Jason W. Moore
That is, for one thing, wrong. Yes, white supremacy is a result of the process, but this is part of the general realignment of social democratic parties, as people like Elizabeth Humphreys have detailed around the neoliberal agenda. Of course, this should not surprise us that Social Democrats, almost without exception, and there are one or two exceptions, move to the right. They cooperate with the deep state. Social Democrats hate the left. They hate the left more than they hate the right. What they want to do is either move right, like you’re saying with the AfD, and this is all across Europe; as you know, the rise of the populist right is channeling working-class outrage at the social democratic and centrist liberal Christian democratic model.
Working class people should be outraged. It’s a failure of the left. It’s a failure of the academic cultures which embraced anything but class leftism, ABC leftism, and refused to keep their hands on the tiller and steer towards the North Star around working class revolution and the expansion of democracy and of working class power. Socialism is not more power for the professional-managerial class. Socialism is more power for the working class.
Talia Baroncelli
Right. Having this totalizing view of everything as just being a product of white supremacy, in a way, reinforces those racialized structures and white supremacy because it doesn’t present a threat to the classes that control the modes of production and that are the consolidated bourgeois or rich elite.
Jason W. Moore
Yes.
Talia Baroncelli
If you just focus on that aspect, which is a result and maybe not the driving factor, then you don’t get any real shift in the material conditions or in redistribution of power, any universal working class struggle, which would actually in turn, contribute to the livelihoods of racialized and marginalized people. The outcome of that lens or of that way of understanding the world, in a way, it just reinforces it. It doesn’t lead to any change.
Jason W. Moore
It absolutely reinforces it. We see this around the critique of settler colonialism. What’s the politics of settler colonialism? It’s supposedly ethnic cleansing. The inverse of it is inverted ethnic cleansing. That’s not what we need. We don’t need more nations. We need the proletariat to run the affairs of the planet and to proceed to abolish class distinctions.
Around this question of race and racial capitalism, much of the current vogue is a rejection of the Communist parties; I think in the U.S., the Communist Party USA’s position on multiracial working-class unity, pioneered by people like W. E. B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones, and many others in this period. I’ve written a little bit about this. I urge people to go back and consider the multiracial, anti-imperialist, feminist proletarian strategy, all of which sounds very old-fashioned. It sounds old-fashioned because the neoliberal ideological offensive has memory-holed and destroyed our capacity to remember these traditions. It’s deracinated us, uprooted us from traditions of communists and socialist struggle. Whether we agree with those traditions or not, or we want to advance them, renew them, or be creative around them, we need to remember what they were in order to do that, not simply reinvent woke wheels.
Talia Baroncelli
Right. Just one final thing. I don’t know if we’ll have much time to get into this, but if you look at the legal apparatus that’s in place after the First World War and the Second World War, you have the right to self-determination. It’s all this rights framework that is based around the nation state. That in itself is not going to cut it because if you look at, for example, the right to self-determination of Palestinians, I don’t see how having a two-state solution, for example, is all of a sudden going to address all of the issues because ultimately there is a class factor.
As you were talking about the various capitalist ways of cheapening nature and cheapening humans and pulling people into this system which cheapens them, that’s not going to be addressed if you have rights that align with the interests of nation-states and the interests of nation-states also serve the interests of the neoliberal class. I guess we need to get somewhere, and there has to be some sovereignty for the Palestinians, for example. But seeing it as an issue of statehood is, in my view, poorly wrong.
Jason W. Moore
Well, and there’s a profound naiveté around national self-determination. As the Russians discovered in 1917, simply hoisting the red flag or whatever flag of color you choose does not make you independent. The imperialist countries do not want independence. This was what America had to wrestle with as the world’s hegemonic power after World War II: how to control and dominate a world without a formal colonial structure. They were wrestling with this all the way through. Basically, you could go along with the Americans, or you would be subjected to, well, say, the experience of Vietnam. That’s something that I think has not been properly digested. There is this long history of what it takes to win self-determination, never mind building socialism.
Many of these radlib academics go out and say, “Well, socialism failed. It didn’t do this. It didn’t do that.” It’s like, well, according to whom? I mean, according to those who benefited from the defeat of Nazism, maybe socialism succeeded. Maybe that was what socialism in the 20th century was about. Maybe it was about opening space for third-world movements. Do we think for a minute that Libya went from the most secular and prosperous country in Africa to a country where there are open slave markets on the streets of Bengasi? Do we think that Libya, for a moment, would have been destabilized if the Soviet Union was still around? There’s that naivete that comes from memory-holing history. I called this in one recent essay, The Flight From History. This is what pretty much defines most of this radlib, radical posturing, decolonial set of arguments in the world, and it crucially undermines our capacity to forge the worldwide proletarian solidarity necessary to begin to push at the imperial structures that hold the climate, the capitalogenic climate machine together.
I’ve said this many times. If we want to do something concrete, let’s demand that all of the European armies withdraw from the rest of the world, the American armies. Get the French out of Africa. Get the U.S. out of Africa. Shut down the bases, 700 plus bases, and three new bases in the Philippines to face off against the Chinese now. These are the real coercive instruments of political power. They’re not going to go away because people occupy a town square. Now, occupying a town square may be necessary as part of the struggle. Don’t get me wrong, but it’s not like Congress is going to convene and say, “Let’s shut down the bases.”
Talia Baroncelli
Well, I think next time we talk, it would be good to do an episode on the various strategies and also real existing socialism. The different experiences of the Soviet Union, for example, and whether this Vanguard strategy that’s driven by a specific party is the way to go or if there could have been correctors to that. That’s a whole other debate, which we could get into next time, and there’s a lot of scholarship on that.
Jason W. Moore, it’s been really great to speak to you.
Jason W. Moore
Absolutely.
Talia Baroncelli
Thanks so much for your time. Let’s talk again soon.
Jason W. Moore
Talia, it has been a pleasure. Thank you for such a lively conversation. For those who are interested in anything that I’ve just said, you can go to my website, jasonwmoore.com.
Talia Baroncelli
Thank you for watching theAnalysis.news. If you’d like to support us, you can go to our website, theAnalysis.news. Hit the donate button at the top right corner of the screen and get on to our mailing list. See you next time.
Jason Moore is an environmental historian and historical geographer at Binghamton University, where he is a professor of sociology and leads the World-Ecology Research Collective. He is the author or editor, most recently, of Capitalism in the Web of Life, Capitalocene or Anthropocene?, Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, and, with Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. His books and essays on environmental history, capitalism, and social theory have been widely recognized, including the Alice Hamilton Prize of the American Society for Environmental History (2003), the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the Section on the Political Economy of the World-System (American Sociological Association, 2002 for articles, and 2015 for Web of Life), and the Byres and Bernstein Prize in Agrarian Change (2011). He coordinates the World-Ecology Research Network.
