Jason W. Moore is an environmental historian and professor of political economy at the Department of Sociology at Binghamton University (USA). In March 2023, he and Gennaro Avallone, professor of sociology at the University of Salerno, met to discuss his latest collection of essays in Italian translation, Oltre la giustizia climatica: Verso un’ecologia della rivoluzione [Beyond Climate Justice: Towards an Ecology of Revolution] (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2024). Prof. Avallone edited and translated the essays, writing an introduction that clarifies the world-ecology conversation in the context of Italian struggles and Marxist debates.
What follows is an edited and expanded version of the original conversation. Where relevant, hyperlinks to ideas referenced in the interview direct the reader to specific texts. Many of Moore’s essays can be found on his website, including translations in multiple languages.
Jason, I prepared some questions for this presentation. The first concerns the title. Social movements are committed to asserting climate justice. Here, however, the need to go beyond climate justice is declared.
The title of Oltre la giustizia climatica: Verso un’ecologia della rivoluzione [Beyond Climate Justice], as well as the first chapter, is a tribute to Martin Luther King, jr. When King broke his silence on the war in Vietnam, on April 4, 1967, he gave a famous speech. It was entitled “Beyond Vietnam.” He said the Vietnam War was not a narrow problem; it was not a “mistake,” as liberals claimed. It was, rather, the result of what he called the Triple Evils: imperialism, racism and class exploitation. This was politically dangerous, and King knew it. In the last year of his life, he worked to organize a movement and coalition that would unite the antiwar, civil rights, and labor movements in the United States. Tragically, he was assassinated a year after that speech, almost certainly at the hands of the American security state.
As Sixties radicals often argued, the issue is not the issue. Of course the core problem is capitalism, and the “solution” – the higher synthesis – is socialism. By capitalism, I mean something quite specific – and different from populist notions of capitalism as an economic system or an aggregation of corporate power. For socialists, capitalism is a structure of class power whose reproduction flows through the law of value’s gravitational field: the abstract imperative to accumulate capital. That implies, and necessitates, imperialism, in Lenin’s and Luxemburg’s distinctive formulations but also more broadly, as a geopolitics of accumulation. As Marx demonstrates, at the core of it all is a labor-metabolic antagonism through which all class societies are mediated. Simply: the capitalist world-ecology is a logic and pattern of class struggle in the web of life. Its gravedigger is the planetary proletariat, a combined and uneven configuration of paid and unpaid work, performed by humans and the rest of nature: proletariat, femitariat and biotariat, as argued in Abstrakt.
Today, “climate justice” has been thoroughly emptied of its class content. Climate and environmental “justice” politics have been contained and coopted, especially through the NGO-industrial complex and the power of the billionaire Foundations. “Justice” no longer suggests workers’ power – if it ever did! – but a kind of woke neoliberal redistributionism. Some groups and organizations seek to give it radical content; but these are a minority. I have previously spoken of planetary justice. It has some propaganda value. But I now doubt its interpretive substance, at least from a Marxist perspective. It fits more readily within the Polanyian frame that has hegemonized the academic left. For socialists, of course, the goal is not justice but working-class democracy, which advances only through the appropriation of capital – as social wealth but also as the mechanism of investment. The democratization of all life necessitates the leveling of class society. This orients us towards something more revolutionary than social democratic projects and their mealy-mouthed arguments for “economic democracy.”
The ruling classes have thoroughly appropriated climate justice. The White House uses it. The World Economic Forum uses it. Wall Street uses it. The Foundations fund it. Even those on the climate left by and large refuse to allow their climate justice arguments to mean a class politics that might redistribute wealth and power from the super-rich to the vast majority of humanity. These are the kinds of people who talk about climate apartheid but never the climate class divide. Matt Huber’s Climate Change as Class War makes this point well, even if there are significant differences between comrades, not least divergent readings of Marx’s class theory and historical method in the web of life, see here.
Invoking class is necessary but insufficient; we must take Marx and Engels seriously when they called their philosophy historical materialism. Most Marxists today are untroubled by world-historical curiosity. Most Marxist theory is, like “critical” theory more broadly, afflicted by a neoliberal memory-holing of capitalist history. When the proletarian and revolutionary forces were at high tide, in the long 1960s, the Transition Debate – feudalism to capitalism, capitalism to socialism – ran at full throttle. Revolutionary praxis depends on this retrodictive moment, the explanation of previous class struggles and accumulation crises; without it, praxis is exceedingly “one-sided,” as Marx liked to say.
The world-ecological reading of Marx and Lenin speaks to this weakening of this world-historical dimension. It matters to socialist strategy that the climate crisis has been driven by the capitalogenic trinity of the climate class divide, climate patriarchy, climate apartheid; it also matters that this trinity emerged out of the class-imperial dynamics of accumulation and is not a mishmash of transhistoric racialism and patriarchy with a reified conception of colonialism. There’s a world history to this capitalogenic unity that’s been ignored by the climate justice left. That’s bad praxis, because the specific class-metabolic antagonisms of today’s climate crisis can only be grasped by identifying their historical origins and development. That story, of capitalism’s internalized and externalized relations with climate and other webs of life, is fundamental to our political vistas. These vistas are woefully inadequate so long as they refuse to recognize how the climate crisis is a class struggle in the web of life. The “masters of mankind” (after Adam Smith) know this without any doubt; most environmentalists do not.
To realize clarity on this requires a vision of socialism and communism in the sense outlined by Marx and Engels as a world-historical movement of class struggle. They are emphatic: “the proletariat can… only exist world-historically” through a “twofold relation: on the one hand as a natural, on the other, as a social relation.” That’s from The German Ideology. Because bourgeois naturalism, a geocultural affair, is so significant in capitalist history, the conception of class must incorporate the critique of “ruling ideas” – or what I call ruling abstractions. The brief explanation is that bourgeois naturalism is the raw material for capitalism’s geocultural regimes of domination. Before racism and sexism, there had to be Prometheanism. Its core premise, linked to successive Civilizing Projects, is the domination of Man over Nature, and the redefinition of a great many human beings as “savage.” This was, obviously, an ideological re-inscription of the struggle between bourgeois and proletarian. The fact that so many Marxists have fallen prey to this ideological mystification is testimony to the bourgeoisie’s power over the “means of mental production.”
This is the importance of the class-materialist reconstruction of the capitalist world-ecology. From this perspective, climate history is marked by turning points as class-historical events. The ecosocialist mainstream has kept its distance from such a synthesis. Worse, in relation to these specific arguments ecosocialists have evaded these climate-class theses entirely. This has two very negative effects on revolutionary Marxism. First, it undercuts the collective and comradely project to develop a unified theory of geocultural domination, class formation and struggle, and world accumulation in the web of life. Second, it renders ecosocialist politics vulnerable to forms of geographical materialism that smuggle in neo-Malthusian substance fetishism, as with the fossil capital slogan, which encourages ultra-left adventurism.
Other tendencies want a “racial Capitalocene” without class struggle or a “plantationocene” without world accumulation. (Neither offers new interpretations of capitalism’s environmental history.) Sundering class formation and geocultural domination, such approaches are perfectly consonant with progressive neoliberal theory, defined by its rejection of class or the defanging of class analysis within bourgeois pluralism. At every turn, geocultural domination is abstracted from its geohistorical patterns of capital, class and empire as environment-making processes. Curiously, neither ecosocialism nor “critical” tendencies have much to say about bourgeois naturalism as a formative ingredient in capitalist hegemony. Given the recurrence of a long Malthusian cycle – an ideological engine of racialization and gendering – from Locke and Descartes through Malthus to Galton, Ehrlich, and the recent Popular Anthropocene, this is hardly a footnote to socialist struggles today.
These issues assume new importance in capitalism’s epochal crisis. The climate shift figures prominently in this crisis, for many reasons but especially its impact on capitalist agricultural productivity – in its physical and value dimensions. But the climate crisis is not reducible to its geophysical and atmospheric consequences; nor can it be explained through fossil fuel consumption. Those are key moments. Left on their own, the resulting theory favors substance fetishism: the view that history can be explained through the interaction of substances moving through technical and organizational facilities. For Marx, against Descartes, substances are relational processes. Coal is just a rock in the ground; it only becomes a fossil fuel under definite geohistorical circumstances of class, capital and empire. Historically, the geophysical impacts of climate are significant – the rise of capitalism during the Little Ice Age is a key moment; the crisis of the Roman West in the Dark Ages Cold Period is another. Different civilizations, organized in distinctive ecotones through definite modes of production and class dynamics, respond differently to climate shifts. Climate change in the geophysical sense is what we might call a “basic fact,” after the great historian E.H. Carr. Climate history as a class-historical dynamic belongs to a different reading, of what Lukacs called the “developing tendencies of history”… even if Lukacs bent the stick too far toward social determinism! These include basic facts but are not reducible to them.
And yet, much of the left has fallen prey to a kind of basic fact-determinism. This occurs more or less automatically when we accept the bourgeois reckoning of climate history over a Marxist, class-historical reading of patterns and crises. This latter allows us to make sense of a load-bearing pillar of the climate justice lexicon: climate as “existential threat.” Climate emergency language is now everywhere. Recognizing “state of emergency” rhetoric as a staple of authoritarianism does not minimize one’s assessment of the real dangers of the climate crisis. Both things can be true. State-of-emergency rhetoric and policy were used throughout the neoliberal era. In another register, eco-catastrophism has been a constant refrain of the Environmentalism of the Rich since 1968. Its basic argument? There’s no time for democracy. The threat of eco-catastrophe requires massive coercion, guided by “the science.” This was Hardin and Ehrlich, and even the social democrat Heilbroner, in the 1970s. The enormous expansion of the biosecurity state during the pandemic, and the attendant suppression of civil liberties and political speech, suggests one ruling class approach to climate politics in the coming decade.
Essentially, “existential threat” and “climate emergency” ideology are pillars of the new climate consensus. Aside from a few flat-earthers, everyone agrees on the reality of climate change. The CEO of ExxonMobil, Joe Biden, Klaus Schwab. However, their climate reality is very narrow; Marx would have called it “abstractly material.” That was his characterization of bourgeois science. The ruling classes have a convenient explanation for the climate crisis: it’s anthropogenic. It’s a form of “soft denialism.” It recognizes the physical realities of a problem and explains it through an abstract humanity. This is the same playbook elaborated by Ehrlich and American imperial environmentalism from the Sixties onwards: explain poverty, pollution and other problems through “too many people” (after Ehrlich). This is not a speculative connection. The Anthropocene trope of the “human enterprise” was lifted directly from the Ehrlichs. Of course, the climate crisis is not anthropogenic; it’s capitalogenic.
When you talk about the web of life in Oltre la giustizia climatica / Beyond Climate Justice, you connect this concept to that of ‘biotariat.’ This word was coined by a poet, Stephen Collis, who proposed to define “biotariat” as “that portion of existence which is fenced off as a ‘resource’ from and for those who direct and benefit from the accumulation of wealth […]. Therefore, the entirety of the enclosed and exploited life of this planet”. Can you explain how you use “biotariat”?
Web of life invites us to unthink Nature. I can’t overstate this point: Nature is a ruling abstraction. It is the most dangerous word in the bourgeois lexicon. Nature is modernity’s N-word for the web of life. I do not say this lightly. As a ruling abstraction, it is intimately joined to – indeed it was the immediate precondition for – the emergence of modern racial and gendered class projects as strategies of superexploitation in the long seventeenth century.
The biotariat is crucial in this critique and alternative. Let me explain. The biotariat is not a separate essence, but – following Marx’s language – a decisive “moment” of class formation. This is the gist of the classical Marxist position, including that of Marx, Plekhanov, and the early Wittfogel, on natural conditions and the productive forces and relations. Reality is not a Venn diagram with partly-overlapping circles of biotariat, femitariat, and proletariat; rather, these labor-metabolic moments form a “rich totality of many determinations,” again following Marx.
Collis gives us the word, but we do not – yet – have an adequately Marxist concept. Turning relations into resources, as Collis underlines, is central. But capitalism is not an abstract system that consumes resources; its essence is a logic of accumulation that mobilizes work; that work is both paid and unpaid, productive and reproductive, human and extra-human. This is the trinity of the planetary proletariat: of proletariat, femitariat, and biotariat. These moments cannot be reduced to each other; neither can they be abstractly separated. They must be joined historically through the labor-metabolic contradictions specifically organized through endless accumulation and its uneven dynamics of class formation and struggle. There is a not proletariat over here and a biotariat over there and a femitariat somewhere else. Rather, these are moments, in Marx’s precise methodological sense of that word – moments of the class struggle in the web of life, assuming distinctive combinations and mediations across capitalism’s historical geography.
Collis’s use of enclosure is insightful, and allows us to elaborate its implications within a Marxist frame. Many critical theorists see the problem as “enclosure” through a kind of left-Polanyian lens – as a problem rooted in the extension of market relations rather than class power. This is no quibble, since the movement towards a “self-protecting society” can be carried out by ruling classes. There are important elements within the trilateralist bourgeoisie inclined towards a climate strategy that seeks to resolve the crisis on the backs and bellies of the planetary proletariat. This is clearly on offer from the interests that converge around the World Economic Forum and framed through Orwellian vistas of “planetary stewardship” and “nature positive.”
Enclosure has a specific place in Marxist thought. It is about class formation, not resource consumption as such. A critical mass of proletarian labor-power must be produced and reproduced in capitalism’s successive valorization regimes: regimes of socially necessary labor-time. Enclosures, broadly conceived, not only expel labor from the countryside, but also bind labor to it. There is a long history of such labor reserves in the history of imperialism, from Ireland to colonial Peru to Africa in the twentieth century. Indeed, the normal state of the world proletariat is some version of semi-proletarianization, through which the reproduction costs of labor-power are reduced through manifold forms of unpaid work, deeply feminized, and frequently involving non-market or “subsistence-surplus” cultivation. This is very common in the history of capitalism – even in 1930s America, for instance, working-class families in industrial towns frequently maintained food-producing gardens, kept chickens, hunted deer. This goes on still. On a larger scale, successive agricultural revolutions – premised on the logic of advancing relative surplus value – took flight by “putting nature to work” for free, or for well below the systemwide average costs. The punch line? The regime of socially necessary labor-time, and the struggle to advance the rate of profit, turns on the political, cultural, and juridical appropriations of socially necessary unpaid work.
This is a dialectic of class struggle in the web of life, embodied in the bourgeois struggle to advance the rate of profit and to protect the mass of capital through modes of political accumulation, to borrow a phrase from Bob Brenner.
One further point is crucial to socialist politics. The capitalist drive towards “accumulation by appropriation” – the mobilizing of socially necessary unpaid work to sustain or advance relative surplus value – requires political power but also forms of geocultural domination. Thus we encounter another trinity: modern Prometheanism, racism, and sexism. It’s from Prometheanism that imperial naturalism is born. This is not some abstract “will to power.” Prometheanism is the ideology of domination that flowed from the imperial-bourgeois invention of Nature as a ruling idea. This was not a “will to power” – the dominant thesis of woke bourgeois nationalism – but a will to profit. As Claudia von Werlhof underlines, Nature became everything the bourgeoisie did not wish to pay for. Hence the subsequent emergence of modern sexism and racism – ideologically framed through Nature – during the “long, cold seventeenth century” (c. 1557-1700). That climate-class conjuncture threatened to terminate capitalist civilization – in ways roughly analogous to the feudal crisis two centuries prior. Modern domination invariably finds its core philosophical premise in Nature and “natural law” – this is the standpoint of the bourgeoisie. But far from being “merely” ideological, it is fundamental to policy formation that shapes labor markets (in every form) and seeks to convince workers that they have more in common with the ruling class than their fellow workers. Bourgeois nationalism is a famous case in point, and sadly one that has recently returned under cover of an abstract decoloniality.
This has profound implications for class politics today. As I have mentioned, proletarianization is, historically speaking, semi-proletarianization. It depends upon regimes of unpaid work, and most obviously in everyday life, on unpaid care work that is feminized. But take note: feminization is a characterization that rests on a fetish. The category “women’s work” derived from bourgeois naturalism and scientism, and the invention of the category Woman – which as Silvia Federici shows, emerged at precisely the tipping point of proletarianization in Europe after 1550. But the femitariat is not literally “women’s work” in its common sense rendering (the standpoint of bourgeois ecofeminism); the planetary proletariat is a combined and uneven interpenetration of paid and unpaid work, human and extra-human. This is the Marxist alternative to professional-managerial class renderings of intersectionality. It matters because proletarian unity – in the dialectical and not formalist sense – is a necessary premise in the ideological struggle against efforts to fetishize ethno-racial, gender, national, and other differences: these are essential elements of the ruling class’s divide-and-rule strategy.
Jason, I have another question related to imperialism. In this new book Oltre la giustizia climatica / Beyond Climate Justice, the word “war” is present in many places, as is science. My first question concerns “Good Science.” Can you explain what you mean and how it contributes to your critique of ideology?
Historically, modern science unfolds through a nexus of instrumental knowledge and ideological process. From the beginning, Marxists wrestled with this thorny question – the work of Hessen, Grossman, and the early Wittfogel is fundamental. The line between the two is blurred at every step. On the one hand, there is what Marx calls the “abstractly material” character of modern scientific inquiry, narrated through successive scientific revolutions. The Cartesian Revolution marked a turning point, a true revolution in the regularized application of natural science for instrumental purposes. On the other hand is the ideological formation, and cyclical reinvention, of Good Science. These were, and remain, ideologies of natural law and express themselves in bourgeois naturalism, which gestates in the Iberian world a century before Descartes. Let’s be clear that the Cartesian Revolution was a bourgeois synthesis committed to capitalist managerialism: the management of labour, land and life during the era’s unprecedented proletarianization (1550-1750). One cannot understand the formative moment of primitive accumulation without it. Nor can one understand contemporary environmentalism.
Environmentalists tell us to “listen to the science.” That’s a horrible slogan. It’s a reactionary slogan. I’m amazed that I have to make this point, given the relation between scientism and class power in the twentieth century, not least the history of eugenics, war and all manner of scientific racisms.
Please don’t mistake my argument. We should read and listen to scientists. But “the science” has, from the origins of capitalism, served the profit-driven instrumentalization of life and an ideological bastion of “natural law.” From Malthus to Galton’s eugenics to Ehrlich’s Population Bomb-ism, we’re told that the source of the problem can be found in the world’s dangerous classes. The source of inequality, they tell us, is not exploitation and enclosure but “natural law.” This is Good Science. In the book, I call it the opiate of the environmentalists.
Good Science is therefore a commentary on how the bourgeoisie conceives of science, which lies within an ideological framework that is central to the origins of climate science and the origins of postwar earth-system science. This goes back to the work of Jay Forrester, Vannevar Bush, Norbert Weiner, and others after World War II. The first thing to observe is that the development of earth system science after the War was fundamental to American hegemony, incubating a new “science regime” within its permanent war economy. Perrin Selcer has written an excellent book on this, How the United Nations Built Spaceship Earth. As with the Anthropocene-industrial complex, the postwar scientific infrastructure was only partly about instrumental knowledge in service to world power and world accumulation. It was also deeply embedded in an ideological project that justified the Cold War and planetary managerialism. So too, with the Anthropocene’s techno-scientific anti-politics in the twenty-first century.
Jay Forrester is a fascinating case of Cold War science, deeply relevant to post-1970 environmentalism. Forrester came to fame in the mid-1950s as the architect of something called SAGE: the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment Air Defense System. Designed to eliminate Soviet bombers in the wake of an American first strike, SAGE’s core was an extraordinary computing network that allowed for real-time operations and a fully interactive human-machine interface: a breakthrough for cybernetics as an infrastructure of world hegemony. Although SAGE was quickly rendered obsolete by the ICBM revolution, its cyberneticism developed rapidly. I want to underline how cybernetics was a knowledge system specifically organized to enable technocratic rule in its widest – and most dystopian – sense. It was a fusion of scientific-technical rationality with planetary managerialism. What was to be managed? The workers, the empire, the cities, and increasingly, the biosphere. This was not completely new. Its elements had been in formation since the Cartesian Revolution.
But the socio-technical requirements and possibilities of monopoly capitalism allowed these elements to be synthesized as never before. When Forrester was installed as a professor in the newly-created Sloane School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956, he immediately set about developing the managerial implications of what he called “systems dynamics.” First came a book on industrial dynamics, then – in response to the urban revolts of the mid-1960s – a book on urban dynamics. Finally came world dynamics. Forrester’s World3 model was the basis for 1972’s The Limits to Growth. MIT was a pillar of what J. William Fulbright called the “military-industrial-academic complex”? Today’s Anthropocene is the heir to this synthesis of Good Science, American hegemony, and the totalizing ambitions of planetary managerialism – now re-branded as “planetary stewardship.”
Marxists have not adequately engaged these entwined relations between science, ideology, imperialism and world accumulation. But only a dialectical and geohistorical approach – a dialectical and proletarian materialism – is capable of such a synthesis. It is an urgent matter as the climate crisis rings the death knell of capitalism. We are fooling ourselves if we believe that the masters of mankind have no strategy for addressing the climate crisis; they do – and it involves the geopolitical suppression of living standards and the further restriction of democratic possibilities in the name of “saving nature.”
Good Science has entered a new phase. Its morbid symptoms express capitalism’s epochal crisis, articulated through the cultural logic of the “climate emergency.” It tells us that we “have no time” and, therefore, we must submit to the techno-scientific measures proposed by the ruling classes.
Now for my next question. Your essays consider the problem of world war and militarized accumulation. What is the function of war in the climate crisis?
Across the long history of class societies and climate change, war is a recurrent phenomenon. The mechanism can be stated simply, although the historical reality is undoubtedly complex. Unfavorable climate shifts, such as the onset of the Little Ice Age around 1300, undermine the class-technical agronomies of class societies. This, in turn, induces a crisis of reproduction of the class structure of extracting surplus labor. What Bob Brenner calls “rules of reproduction” are not merely social, but socio-ecological, especially in relation to climate. All things being equal, a shorter growing season and unfavorable weather undercuts agricultural productivity, the biological basis for surplus labor and surplus accumulation. In late medieval Europe, the climate shift and class revolt went hand-in-hand, limiting the feudal surplus even as seigneurial demand on the surplus was rising. The Crowns and the seigneurs tried to advance the “rate of seigneurial levy” (after Guy Bois) – and failed. Essentially, they lost the class struggle to re-establish a feudal mode of production in the midst of climate change. As they failed, they went to war with each other, to win in battle what they had lost in the class struggle.
The relationship between climate, class and war is not unique to capitalism, but it assumes new, specifically modern features. In one of my essays in Oltre la giustizia climatica / Beyond Climate Justice, “Imperialism, With and Without Cheap Nature,” I underline how modern world wars have been closely bound to climate history. Of capitalism’s three major Thirty Years Wars, two– in the early seventeenth century and Anglo-French wars between the 1780s and 1815 – occurred during the coldest periods of the Little Ice Age. (The world wars of the twentieth century were also wars over Cheap Nature, but not influenced by a major climate shift.) This is emphatically not a question of climate determinism but of climate-class conjunctures that mix dialectical and non-dialectical socio-ecological antagonisms. (For instance, the impact of 1783’s Laki Fissure eruption or solar cycles are non-dialectical antagonisms metabolized differently by different modes of production and geo-social formations.) These antagonisms are mediated through capitalism’s labor/class metabolic arrangements.
Today, we are seeing modernity’s fourth Thirty Years War. It expresses not just climate change but all manner of biospheric antagonisms joined to the end of Cheap Nature. Broadly defined, the US-led coalition, incorporating the European Union, Japan and smaller client states like Israel and Australia, is facing off against a China-led coalition. All the major players are arming themselves as fast as possible. Of course, the US remains the pre-eminent war machine. It’s worth noting that, according to the Military Interventions Project at Tufts University, nearly one-third of American foreign military interventions since 1776 have occurred since 1999. That is not the whole story of American warmongering and its relation to climate. Still, we can’t ignore it – as the Anthropocene story does, and so do virtually all Marxist accounts of capitalogenic climate crisis.
The systemwide dynamic can be stated simply. The greater the exhaustion of Cheap Natures, the lower the rate of profit, and the greater the overaccumulation crisis. To borrow an insight from Giovanni Arrighi, the greater the overaccumulation crisis, the more forceful the tendency of the imperialist forces to protect the mass of capital against other imperialists. World wars are moments of geopolitical determination – by force of arms – of who will have access to Cheap Nature. Today there are no more Cheap Natures sufficient to offset the overaccumulation of capital. Apace with the Great Implosion, the tendency towards geopolitical accumulation moves to center stage.
The flashpoints of “low-intensity” world war threaten to activate a high-intensity war. (Keeping in mind that these wars are only “low-intensity” for those who live far away.) This is the risk posed by America’s NATO expansion and its war with Russia over Ukraine neutrality; with the American-Israeli war on Gaza; with American saber-rattling in Taiwan and the construction of new military bases in the Philippines.
For now, as in the Cold War, the hot wars will be fought in the Global South. The politics of the Saheel states today are instructive. Whatever the precise causal role of Niger’s new leadership in pushing up uranium prices, uranium has become increasingly costly over the past year. By the end of March 2024, spot prices on commodity markets were 76 percent higher than the year prior. Both war and nationalism in the South tend to drive commodity prices upwards; periods of imperialist triumph, as with the Washington Consensus and the neoliberal debt regime several decades ago, tend to drive commodity prices lower. This is at the center of world-ecology’s class-imperial thesis on Cheap Nature: commodity prices are an index of the worldwide class struggle and its political mediations.
Perhaps because many ecosocialists are soft on imperialism, they’ve paid insufficient attention to the geopolitics of Cheap Nature. The exhaustion of Cheap Nature is not reducible to soil fertility or mineral depletion. American Cold War imperialism is illuminating in this regard. The great fear of American imperial planners was not communism but the possibility that the states of the Global South – including the Soviet Union – would take the American rhetoric of self-determination seriously. Taken seriously, it would lead to a situation where these states would use national resources for popular development –consuming the Cheap Natures that would otherwise go to the United States. Hegemony over those Cheap Natures – Middle Eastern oil is only the era’s most dramatic example – allowed the U.S. to keep Japan and the western Europeans under its thumb.
Today, the exhaustion of Cheap Nature, the real basis of the law of value, signals a new phase of Lenin’s classic thesis on “wars of redivision.” Only now the problem is monopoly capitalism not in its ascendance but its epochal decadence. The old logic of war and Cheap Nature persists, but without the possibilities long offered by the conquest of new frontiers. Previously, these possibilities allowed the economic pie (the mass of capital) to grow, and therefore to defuse some measure of inter-imperialist rivalry by re-establishing the socio-ecological basis of renewed accumulation. Those possibilities no longer exist. We live in the Great Implosion, the world-historical reversal of capitalism’s relation to the web of life: from a relation that generated productivity advance and cost minimization, to a deepening stagnation of productivity, rising costs, and an unprecedented overaccumulation crisis. Ecological Marxism, which has largely abandoned Marxist crisis theory, tends towards an exaggerated view of capitalism’s resilience as a result. Not only is capitalism not resilient, but the Great Implosion reveals its fragility. Bad climate has always been bad for ruling classes. Whether or not it will be good for the planetary proletariat depends on how well the worldwide class struggle moves beyond climate justice – and steers toward the communist horizon.
