Cosmos, Production, and Anarchy

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In our era of climate change and global environmental catastrophes, is communism relevant anymore? At first glance, there are at least three reasons to doubt it. 

The first reason to doubt the relevance of communism is the unprecedented nature of the present. The specific details of our era differ fundamentally from those that defined the time when communism and its principal theories were born. Our age is characterized by unprecedented phenomena taking place on a previously inconceivable scale, including global warming, the large-scale pollution of our air, land, and waterways, the depletion of water resources in key places on the planet, and the sixth mass extinction. It is in this new world, whose natural limits prevent us from dreaming of unlimited production, that ecological movements, inspired more often by anarchism than communism, have arisen.

For almost two centuries, socialisms—anarchisms, communisms, populisms, anticolonialisms, feminisms—have carried the flame of social emancipation. Since the nineteenth century, they have shared a cosmology, that is, the representation of a world held in common from which critical statements can take shape and projects can be set in motion. That world was populated by a host of beings that Karl Marx grouped into the category of “productive forces”: mines and factories, laborers, colonies, resources (woods, charcoal, cotton, guano), animals (sheep, often English ones), machines (powered increasingly by steam), plantations and slaves, forms of technological and scientific knowledge, and a social division of labor. By “productive forces,” Marx meant the collection of natural, technological, social, and scientific means that a society uses for controlling nature and producing social wealth. These forces brought about historical mediations between societies and their surroundings. They encountered one another in towns that had become expanding places of production and exchange.

Socialisms shared a common goal: the end of the exploitation of labor and the eradication of polities that reproduce class relations. To be sure, different socialist movements didn’t produce the same analyses or strategies, but they addressed the same problem—the abolition of the exploitation of labor—and so, they agreed at times, and they disagreed at times. Yet, they pursued, at the social level, a common project of political emancipation that had first been sketched out in the eighteenth century in the philosophies of natural right—a project that the French Revolution had shown to be realizable or at least had legitimized as one possible future. In addition to a cosmology and a problem, socialisms shared a philosophy of history. What was novel in this was how it brought together a lucid understanding of the atrocities of capitalism and an optimistic vision of the future: the Springtime of the Peoples augured the dawn of the revolution and the good days to come. However, in the countries of the global North, recent evolutions in capitalism have accelerated the destruction of the labor movement rather than put in place conditions that favor the development of communism. Based on the globalization of capital, finance capitalism has participated in the logistical restructuring of the world economy. History has taken a very different direction from the one imagined by early socialists.

From an ecological perspective, the world in which communism was invented has also changed radically. Forests are burning, and the seas are gradually rising everywhere around the world. In Greece, California, Australia, Brazil, Southern Africa, or even in Russia, mega-fires are devouring lands inhabited for millennia. Moving forward, we will be living in a world of droughts and fires, of storms and floods, of tsunamis and nuclear accidents, of zoonoses and pandemics. The SARS-CoV-2, or Covid-19, virus is a good illustration since it is the intrusion of the nonhuman into our social lives. It brought about a form of disaster capitalism in which sovereign nation-states coordinated with one another to limit the pandemic through sacrificing political freedoms and opening themselves up to different levels of exposure to misery, disease, and death. This virus, like all the catastrophes that it announces, confirms the emergence of a “new regime of environmental regulation.”

After Hurricane Katrina pummeled New Orleans in 2005, the philosopher Isabelle Stengers began to call our era that of “Gaia’s intrusion.” Gaia marks the appearance of new protagonists in the history of societies: hurricanes, viruses, fires, droughts. They are autonomous; they act and transform the world in unique ways. This is not to say that these beings have intentions; it would be absurd to attribute intentions to viruses or fires. But they have agency, or a power to transform the world, which forces societies to adapt their organizational methods and survival strategies. Without a doubt, it is the increase of extreme weather events that “ask[s] nothing of us, not even a response,” which change our understanding of history. In 2003, while the US launched a new imperial war to gain control of Iraqi petroleum, the SARS-CoV-1 virus made its first appearance in the global ecosystem. As Stengers writes, this intrusion of the natural world in social history is “a major unknown, which is here to stay . . . It is not a matter of a ‘bad moment that will pass.’ ” Still, the objection could be raised: there is nothing new under the sun. Saying that natural phenomena interrupt human history is to say close to nothing new at all. That the principal preoccupation of societies is the reproduction of their way of life through more or less conscious interventions in their natural surroundings is self-evident.

But humanity has entered into a new era where climatic events that disturb the normal functioning of modern societies will continue to arise more frequently.

We now know that global warming and the frequency of natural disasters are caused by humans. The extraction of non-renewable resources, the consumption of fossil fuels, the production of greenhouse gases, industrial pollution, and consumer-culture waste are the social causes of the biosphere’s destruction. The anthropogenic causes of global warming are tragic, but they also demand that we modify our behavior to preserve the conditions in which humans and other life forms can prosper. By necessity, ecology will become a principle of political organization for the contemporary world. We must acknowledge the activity of these natural beings and their effects on the social world. In other words, natural forces are not only productive forces; they can also disturb the normal functioning of societies through climatic events, or new virological intrusions. Nature’s autonomy prevents its reduction to a simple economic factor. Because we know all this, we cannot pretend that the world that saw the birth of communism is exactly the same as ours. Communist conjecture did not envision strategies to combat what global warming unleashed.

The second reason to doubt the relevance of communism today is the uncertainty about how socialism can be realized today. It is true that communism has not had very good press since the end of the Soviet Union. That is understandable due to the authoritarian cast of socialist governments and the historical defeat of the revolutionary project in Russia. The vanquished rarely have the chance to write history in a way that shows them in a favorable light. But we can point to another hard limit to the past’s large-scale communist experiments: their incapacity to manage the catastrophic ecological effects of the technological infrastructure they brought about. The symbol of this is the Chernobyl disaster on April 26, 1986. In our thermonuclear age, catastrophes are not plot lines in science fiction or fantasy novels but the results of a technological dispositif that forever threatens to slip from our control. A “new climatic regime” of global disasters was inaugurated with the Chernobyl catastrophe. Socialism was helpless. Worse yet, based on an eschatology of progress and a belief in the lack of a natural end to the development of the forces of production, the Soviet Union contributed to its own demise. Here, we run into the ecological limit of one sort of communism, and the ideal of productivism.

It is undeniable that a productivist strain exists deep within Marxism. Based on certain texts of Marx and Engels, this strain was transformed into veritable dogma in state megamachines, which justified themselves through this productivism (Russia and China most notably). Marxism put forth a general theory of revolutionary practice, but it also has helped structure the relations of classes, nations, and environments within the communist movement. It would be wrong to consider it just one formulation among many others in the socialist project. For two centuries, Marxism has been the privileged theoretical and political space thanks to which the communist movement has been able to define the problems of contemporary life. This is the reason why the strategic discussion of canonical texts plays a foundational role in Marxism: this discussion allows practitioners to understand the current conditions of the class struggle in terms of a concrete analysis of the present. But this sometimes leads to forms of dogmatism that base indefensible justifications of reactionary politics on the authority of the text. For instance, during the productivist period, the idea was universally held that increased production would lead to emancipation.

Productivism is based on the idea that human well-being is dependent on our capacity to produce always more material and immaterial things so as to satisfy the imperious desires of the insatiable. In short, the more completely societies dominated nature through technology, the more individuals would be liberated from the chains of labor. This pairing of the domination of nature with the freedom from labor is not, however, unique to communism. In fact, it is a typically modern trope, which can be found as early as René Descartes and Francis Bacon. The specificity of Marxist productivism rests in the idea that the development of the forces of capitalist production would lead to the conditions of a communist revolution. To be sure, in the most celebrated accounting of historical materialism, history is the necessary result of a contradiction between productive forces and the relations of production. The former include all the means (natural, technological, scientific, social) that a society uses to appropriate and transform the material world. The latter are the forms of the organization of production, that is to say, the types of relations that the different groups of a society form among themselves to appropriate nature, organize labor, and distribute goods.

In its most popular versions, historical materialism has led at times to the idea that the appearance of new forces of production would necessarily upend the previous order, producing a revolution in social relations, and that the forces of capitalism would be pushed to their very limit and so would enter into contradiction with the conditions that had given rise to them. This economic productivism still rests on an optimistic historical philosophy that believes in a progress of rationalism embodied in the forces of production. To the extent that the forces of production substantiate the progress of science, they can only be the initial signs of social emancipation. When we study the ecological ramifications of the historical period in which this productivist vision took hold, we can only regret the time’s assumption that scientific progress leads to social emancipation.

The third reason to doubt the relevance of communism in the era of climate change is political. Since the beginning of modernity, ecological movements have relied on other sources than Marxism. From the utopian socialism of Charles Fourier to the social ecology of Murray Bookchin, or the anti-industrial Romanticism of William Morris and the Christian anarchism of Jacques Ellul and Bernard Charbonneau, radical ecologies have run the gamut of theoretical concerns. But, as a group, they have been more influenced by anarchism than communism. All of this exists in a context of small-scale struggles against industrial pollution, ecofeminist strikes, territorial reinventions, queer ecologies, climate and antinuclear activism, and peasant revolts that did not wait for their theoreticians to gather and organize. If political ecologies and worker communisms have relatively distinct heritages, that is because the principal socialist organizations in past times upheld productivist positions, excluding a priori the possibility of tactical alliances with environmental struggles. Moreover, these histories emerged from worlds that, without excluding the other entirely, were mutually indifferent and were traveling toward different destinies. These worlds were anchored in the spatial structure of capital.

Capitalism rests on the territorial division of labor that authorizes the accumulation of value by the ever-greater concentration of the work- force in urban centers. The expanded reproduction of capital presupposes, then, a certain “production of space.” Colonized lands are held in reserve for extractivist appropriation of imperial metropoles where value is produced by the exploitation of wage labor. The urban space concentrates the bulk of the productive population, whereas the deserted countryside is inhabited only by the producers of agricultural goods necessary for the reproduction of the urban workforce. This territorial division of capitalist labor produces an environmental scission within the forces of revolutionary struggles. These struggles are based on habits, practices, discourses, and desires that are noticeably different. Communism is tied to the urban industrial world from which it sprung; yet ecological movements are linked to rural and peasant communities. From our regular contact with machines in the great urban centers, we began to dream of the masses taking over factories and ascending into power. Outside of the cities, a separate dream took hold: the reinvention of collective ways of living that were less alienated from the natural conditions of human existence. This opposition is partly a caricature, but it captures a certain reality. Revolutionary hopes are born as well from past disappointments. In this way, the heritages of communism and ecological movements are relatively different. While the first is attentive to the ways of producing wealth while aiming for the abolition of the exploitation of labor, the second looks to rethink ways of living on Earth while hoping to limit the destruction of the biosphere. These two aims are not incompatible. Their convergence is hinted at in the way that urban and rural worlds remain historically interconnected. In fact, their separation was never complete. Agriculture has become entirely dependent on industrial production for its machines; simultaneously, social life has remained so firmly linked to the natural conditions of reproduction that the urban world cannot completely ignore the rural world, whether in the form of community gardens or peasant soviets. In part, Anthropocene Communism means to show that political ecology will be able to succeed only if it adopts a communist stance: the general flourishing of individuals is dependent upon the abolition of the material conditions of suffering (starting with the exploitation of labor—whether wage, unpaid, or household labor). But this goal must now be rethought through an ecological lens, which so often has been missing from the communist movement. Because the exhaustion of natural resources, the consumption of fossil fuels, and the pollution of ecosystems are the accepted material by-products of the quest for profit, there is no accumulation of value without an exploitation of labor that destroys the environment in ever-intensifying ways.

Anthropocene Communism proposes a counterintuitive thesis: the ecological crisis does not push communism further away; instead, it calls for its urgent return. It is true that communism must shed its productivist trappings in order to become ecological, that it must reorient itself in an era of global warming, and that it must realize the utopian prerogatives of rural communes. But, if we agree to resuscitate communism, it must be as the “cosmopolitics” of the Anthropocene. Perhaps a cosmic politics is a laughable proposition; nevertheless, it is undeniable that ecology involves beings that are “other than humans,” and so new realities for political thought are open for consideration. Whether to fight against the destruction of the biosphere, for the survival of the ozone layer, for the preservation of those species that can still be saved, or for controlling the spread of a virus, nonhuman interests in politics must be addressed. Moving forward, politics must also be conducted with a regard for beings that act silently. Acting in respect to their interests (the survival of the bees, for example) is also done in respect of our best interests (the need for pollination for agricultural production). As the public health crisis in the global ecosystem brought on by the spread of Covid-19 has shown, it is in our best interests that the environments of bats (one of the principal reservoirs of virological biodiversity) remain relatively unthreatened by human activities. And it is the same for permafrost, virgin forests, wetlands, and other relatively untarnished natural habitats. But nonhuman ways of intervening are very different from ours. They do not unite in parties, soviets, or revolutions. Inaugurating an ecological communism assumes an understanding of the type of agency that is unique to life.

Communism must become ecological. And yet this argument is incomplete if it does not include its corollary: political ecology can become truly revolutionary only by becoming communist. This counterintuitive claim activates the seemingly archaic vocabulary of Marxism. Seeing this logic through to its conclusion requires us to understand what in communism’s heritage we must claim for ourselves. 

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This is an edited excerpt from Anthropocene Communism.

Image: Franz Marc, Affenfries. 1911. Via Wikicommons.