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Paul Guillibert is a Researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research and teaches philosophy in Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. His work elaborates the philosophy of Marxist political ecology by confronting classical Marxist texts with contemporary ecological humanities.

For issue #168 of The Internationalist, we excerpt from Anthropocene Communism: Land and Capital in the Age of Disaster by Paul Guillibert (Translation by Matt Reeck).

Here he highlights how historical materialism's productivist logic assumed technological progress would inevitably lead to social emancipation, but this overlooked how capitalism's territorial division of labor created separate revolutionary paths—urban communism focused on labor exploitation and rural ecology focused on biospheric destruction—whose convergence is now urgently needed to address the ecological crisis.

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 forces of production. (Productivism, more broadly, 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.[1] In short, the more completely societies dominated nature through technology, the more individuals would be liberated from the chains of labor.) 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 era’s assumption that scientific progress leads to social emancipation.

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.”[2] 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. Th ese 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. 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 oft en 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.

Central to our concerns is 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.[3] 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.[4] 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.[5] And it is the same for perma-frost, 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 counter-intuitive 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.

[1] Serge Audier, L’Âge productiviste. Hégémonie prométhéenne, brèches et alternatives écologiques (Paris: La Découverte, 2019), 60.

[2] Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992).

[3] Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, trans. Peter Skafish (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 60.

[4] Ibid., 60.

[5] On the connection between Covid-19 and the destruction of bat habitats by deforestation, see Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century (London: Verso, 2020).

Excerpted with permission from ANTHROPOCENE COMMUNISM: Land and Capital in the Age of Disaster, by Paul Guillibert, translated by Matt Reeck, published by Verso Books.

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