Not too long ago, somebody in the midst of a fiery Twitter (or should I say X) debate sent out a poll to their followers in order to settle once and for all whether or not working in climate makes one more or less optimistic about our future. The user in question believed that if one were to actually work on climate issues, then one’s fears of a hothouse earth, of biblical floods, of worldwide crop failures would be assuaged. One instagram account, responding to a detractor, agreed with the original user’s sentiment, saying:

“Omg It’s done the opposite for me I feel like I know way more about all the amazing work that’s going on than when I was just running this page and not working in climate work. I guess it depends on what you do tho”

I do not want to discount this person’s personal experience, but I will be discounting this person’s personal experience. There is no doubt a lot of “amazing work” being done in the name of ecological sustainability, namely large reforestation efforts, new “green” businesses from water bottle alternatives to search engines that remove CO2 from the atmosphere with every search, and most notably the drive for renewable energy in China, which dwarfs all other efforts for the building of renewable energy infrastructure –  but these are mere bandaids on a systemic problem.

Our current ecological catastrophe is a direct result of liberal capitalism and its host of feral offspring known as globalization, imperialism, and productivist accumulation. Marx realized the seeds of these issues in his three volumes of Capital – imperialism and globalization are the results of capitalist markets’ eternal battle against the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and productivism is a result of the abstraction of value from qualities to mere quantities, quantities which we only know to increase ad infinitum,^[1] trapping us in an abysmal business ontology through which even our basic needs are subjugated to industrial capital’s radical monopoly.^[2] With the help of abstract value, capital reduces the complexity of our biophysical and socioeconomic reality into one,^[3] discrete progression of numbers, ultimately resulting in the absolutely absurd implementations of monocrop agriculture in deserts (which are then sent across the globe to be sold to a provider which then simply sells the produce back to the people where the farm was in the first place) and year-round seasonal fruits (which are often imported from imperial periphery countries and produced by exploited workers that never even get to think about trying their own products). Further, the wretched, incestuous combination of abstraction and expansion under capitalism give rise to the metabolic rift, seen today in our ever-growing amounts of waste and our ever depleting topsoils.^[4]

One of the main causes of ecological degradation is economic growth.^[5] The evidence for this is replete: GDP growth is correlated with fossil fuel and material use, and global decoupling of GDP from fossil fuel use and material use has not happened in any meaningful way.^[6] Fossil fuel use, uncontroversially, is the cause of global climate change, which can and likely will result in ecosystem collapse, cascades of failed agricultural yields, and never-before-seen intense storms. Material extraction and use results in both land system change, which demolishes societies and ecosystems, habitats for humans and animals, and introduction of harmful waste materials such as plastics (which have been found in our blood) and chemicals (which cause eutrophication, the phenomena of mass ocean die offs most often resulting from agrochemical overuse).

But where does growth come from? Is it truly a necessity under capitalism? Again, I would recommend using the tools that Marx gave us, which help to provide an outline of the capitalist growth circuit.

Economic growth comes from capitalism’s drive to avoid economic crises, namely, the crisis of overproduction. In a crisis of overproduction, more commodities are produced than can be purchased by consumers due to, among other things, depressed (resulting from increasing surplus value extraction without a concomitant increase in productivity) or deleted (resulting from automation and unemployment) wages. These tendencies are inherent to capitalism – this will be elaborated below:

To understand the drivers of crisis and their snake oil remedy known as growth, we should first understand the nature of wage labor and social reproduction under capitalism. Under capitalism, people are required to work in order to earn a wage so that they can survive. This wage is supposed to be able to provide for the worker’s basic needs like shelter, food, etc. Marx called the meeting of these basic needs social reproduction. The capitalist wants to depress wages as much as they can in order to gain the most profit, but they must do so without breaching the ground level of social reproduction, since this leads to a crisis of overproduction – more money invested in production of commodities and not enough money given to the working class to purchase said commodities. This leaves the capitalist at an impasse – with wages as low as they can feasibly go, how can they extract more surplus value, how are they to gain profit? When wages are at the level of social reproduction, the only way to increase profits is to increase productivity. But how does one do that? The answer is fossil fuels. Since the introduction of fossil fuels into the capitalist system, worker productivity has skyrocketed.^[7] This means that workers can get the same amount of work done in way less time. But if workers were to simply work less, then the capitalist wouldn’t be able to increase profits. Thus, Jevons paradox – the fact that increased efficiency INCREASES net resource use – wins out. Instead of giving workers more time off, capital demands that the workers work the same hours to produce even more goods, increasing net resource use and value production while often keeping wages at the same level.^[8] In short, the introduction of fossil fuels into the circuit of capital increased the surplus value created by each worker, thus giving the capitalist more value to extract from each worker, thus increasing accumulation of capital through exploitation both of workers and the environment. This accumulated capital, wrung like blood from the earth and her people, is then used to reinvest in this vicious cycle and to meet the whims of indulgent capitalists.

Another example of the capitalist drive for growth comes from the process of automation. When productivity becomes so high (often enabled by fossil fuels) so as to make workers irrelevant, a given amount of workers is laid off. When laid off, a worker is unable to make a wage and thus unable to socially reproduce and meet their basic needs. In excess, unemployment predictably leads to a crisis of overproduction, as there are more produced goods but less people able to buy them. In order to avoid this crisis, the economy as a whole needs to offer more jobs. Thus, the said capitalist which would have laid them off instead must expand production, or perhaps another capitalist comes in to begin the manufacture of another commodity. In many cases, this results in ever-loved “innovation” in the form of five different companies’ varieties of the same soda flavor. In any sane universe, automation should be a cause for joy. Under capitalism, it is a death sentence for workers only to be ameliorated by further exploitation of the earth they live on.

Growth causes ecological and social exploitation. The absence of growth equals recession. Thus, a shortage of fossil fuels, which have been theoretically and empirically linked to growth, will lead to a recession. However, further use of fossil fuels will massively disrupt ecosystems on which we rely for social reproduction and economic production. Either way, growth will end. It just depends on who snaps first, the proletariat or the planet.

So now we have seen, through Marx, how capitalism’s internal struggle against itself leads to imperialism, exploitation, and environmental catastrophe. So how does this tie into the Instagram post I cited earlier?

It does not matter how much work is being done to help the environment or the climate – under capitalism, the tendency to catastrophe can not be avoided because the tendency is inscribed into capital itself. These environmental optimists, while valiant in their struggle, miss the big picture, and potentially obscure it for others by claiming that these half-solutions are cause for optimism. When observing this discourse, I am reminded of Lenin’s critique of anarchists in The State and Revolution. He notes that “the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social relations that gave birth to it have been destroyed.”^[9] Marx understands the state as a complex result of class society, as an emergent structure that arises from particular material conditions to serve the dominant class. Lenin, knowing this definition, remarks here that one can’t simply abolish the state without getting rid of its cause – class. Essentially, he is saying that systemic problems require systemic solutions. Climate change, like the state, is an emergent result of imperialism, globalization, value abstraction, growth – the father of these phenomena, as has been elaborated, is capital. We can not expect to solve climate change and ecological collapse by simply developing new technologies, researching new practices, buying different light bulbs, or using different search engines. These solutions are defanged because they decline to engage with the real problem, “the social relation that gave birth to” the ecological crisis, which is capitalism. We cannot simply work parallel to capital in building a new, ecologically harmonious world – we must seize the means of production and redirect the forces of production into a socially productive manner, democratically deciding what to produce, and in some cases scrapping production altogether. We must impose strict resource and emissions caps, we must collectively build re-localized infrastructure that makes it to where we don’t have to rely on arbitrarily labyrinthine and ecologically irrational supply chains, we must choose collectively a modest and dignified standard of living that all the world, not only the global north, can enjoy. We must be able to decide when to stop working, when productivity is high enough for our needs instead of increasing productivity just for the global 1% to buy another vacation home or luxury tour – be it to the stars or the depths of the ocean. We must reacquaint ourselves with the infinitely beautiful depths within nature and other people that have been obscured by capitalist relations.

A cabin in the woods is not the answer. Techno-futurist pipe dreams and energy efficiency is not the answer. Spotty reforestation efforts will not help us. Even renewable energy, in an economy based on growth, can only lead to further exploitation of already vulnerable areas of the world. Technology will not save us. What we need is a political force, a group of people ready to say no to the endless expansion of capitalism, a mass of people ready to seize their own destiny, a mass of people that are done with denying their own future and the future of their children. A thoroughly democratic, planned economy provides a safe way down from our current precipice.

Many years before sustainability was even a concept, there was a group of people who realized that capitalism cannot be regulated away. No technocratic solutions can help, no piecemeal reforms will save us. This group of people understood that real change can only come from revolution. It is about time modern environmentalists and “sustainably” minded people come to this conclusion as well… lest economic recession’s accomplice, fascism, consumes us all.

So tell me, sustainability majors – recession or revolution? Read some theory and get back to me.

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[1] Marx, K. (1867). Capital: A critique of political economy. 107. “Use-values must therefore never be looked upon as the real aim of the capitalist; neither must the profit on any single transaction. The restless never-ending process of profit-making alone is what he aims at.”

[2] Fisher, Mark. Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative?. John Hunt Publishing, 2022. 17. Illich, Ivan, and Anne Lang. “Tools for conviviality.” (1973). 63. Here I use two terms, Mark Fisher’s “business ontology” (the idea that “everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business” and Ivan Illich’s concept of a “radical monopoly”, in which “one industrial production process exercises an exclusive control over the satisfaction of a pressing need and excludes non-industrial activities from competition.” I feel they are linked by the privileged nature of abstract value as described by Marx. Once value is abstracted and divorced from its qualitative dimension, it is used as the standard against which processes are compared instead of, for example, using long term ecological/social viability or human fulfillment. Businesses are thus the most optimal way to meet needs as they produce capital. This leads to the radical dependence which capitalism produces, dependence which valorizes capital all while making people and the environment weaker. This obviously ties into the metabolic rift as well.

[3] Marx, K. (1867). Capital: A critique of political economy. Volume 1, Part 1, Chapter 3. Sutter, A. J. Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico Demaria, Giorgos Kallis (Eds.), Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era, Routledge, Abingdon, UK, 2015. 45. Degrowth advocates, in tandem with Marx, advocate against abstracted value and for qualitative, heterogenous value. “The desired change is qualitative, not quantitative”

[4] Jones, D.L., Cross, P., Withers, P.J.A., DeLuca, T.H., Robinson, D.A., Quilliam, R.S., Harris, I.M., Chadwick, D.R. and Edwards-Jones, G. (2013), REVIEW: Nutrient stripping: the global disparity between food security and soil nutrient stocks. J Appl Ecol, 50: 851-862. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.12089. “Amongst other factors, the spatial disconnects caused by the segregation and industrialisation of livestock systems, between rural areas (where food is produced) and urban areas (where food is consumed and human waste treated) are identified as a major constraint to sustainable nutrient recycling.” Fridolin Krausmann, Christian Lauk, Willi Haas, Dominik Wiedenhofer, From resource extraction to outflows of wastes and emissions: The socioeconomic metabolism of the global economy, 1900–2015, Global Environmental Change, Volume 52, 2018, Pages 131-140, ISSN 0959-3780, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2018.07.003. See Fig. 2-F.

[5] Speth, James Gustave. The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. Yale University Press, 2008. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1npkxd. 14.

[6] On growth and the environment: Donella H. Meadows [and others]. The Limits to Growth; a Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York :Universe Books, 1972. Hickel, Jason. Less is more: How degrowth will save the world. Random House, 2020. 109-114. Wiedmann, Thomas, Manfred Lenzen, Lorenz T. Keyßer, and Julia K. Steinberger. “Scientists’ warning on affluence.” Nature communications 11, no. 1 (2020): 3107. On “decoupling”: Haberl, Helmut, Dominik Wiedenhofer, Doris Virág, Gerald Kalt, Barbara Plank, Paul Brockway, Tomer Fishman et al. “A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part II: synthesizing the insights.” Environmental research letters 15, no. 6 (2020): 065003.

[7] Malm, Andreas. Fossil capital: The rise of steam power and the roots of global warming. Verso Books, 2016. 24. “What could the rotative steam engine accomplish that the hearth and pump of old could not? Most obviously, it could impel a machine: the prime fulcrum of self-sustaining growth, increasing output per capita, raising the productivity of labour in a universal speedup that has yet to see its end.”

[8] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforce-america-united-states-wages-stagnate

[9] Lenin, Vladimir Ilich. The state and revolution. Penguin UK, 1992. 44.