The Tragedy of the Worker
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The Tragedy of the Worker

Towards the Proletarocene

Jamie Allinson, China Miéville, Richard Seymour, Rosie Warren

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eBook - ePub

The Tragedy of the Worker

Towards the Proletarocene

Jamie Allinson, China Miéville, Richard Seymour, Rosie Warren

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About This Book

To understand the scale of what faces us and how it ramifies through every corner of our lives is to marvel at our inaction. Why aren't we holding emergency meetings in every city, town and village every week?What is to be done to create a planet where a communist horizon offers a new dawn to replace our planetary twilight? What does it mean to be a communist after we have hit a climate tipping point? The Tragedy of the Worker is a brilliant, stringently argued pamphlet reflecting on capitalism's death drive, the left's complicated entanglements with fossil fuels, and the rising tide of fascism. In response, the authors propose Salvage Communism, a programme of restoration and reparation that must precede any luxury communism. They set out a new way to think about the Anthropocene. The Tragedy of the Worker demands an alternative future - the Proletarocene - one capable of repairing the ravages of capitalism and restoring the world.

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1
M-C-M′ and the Death Cult
‘How should we dream of this place without us?—
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone’s face?’
—Richard Wilbur, ‘Advice to a Prophet’
Life exists in Vernadskian space. A globe, twenty-five kilometres deep, from the oceanic abyss to the outer limit of the troposphere. A biosphere, to the destruction of which, humanity is witness, and of which, perpetrator.
This biosphere is a contingent product of an improbable and rare chemical interaction, in conditions amounting to a cosmic fluke, in no way inferable from the original state of the planet in the Hadean Eon. Somehow, whether by the work of ‘black smokers’ in the oceanic depths, or by an Oparin-style solar and lightning-induced catalysis of protobiotic compounds, or via some other gradient of chemicals, heat and density, geochemistry became biochemistry. Emergence. Inorganic chemical processes began to self-replicate, gathering energy and atoms from their environment, and adapting to environmental pressures. Once formed, the first life forms depended, as Vernadsky put it, on ‘radiations that pour upon the earth’, causing ‘the matter of the biosphere’ to collect and redistribute solar energy, converting into ‘free energy capable of doing work on Earth’.
For two billion years of life, earth was inhabited solely by single-celled organisms, bacteria and archaea. Sophisticated swimming creatures, they were able to swim, metabolise sugars, avoid toxins, and produce nitrous oxides. (By comparison, our most advanced robotics have struggled to match this level of intelligent, adaptive behaviour, and may even now only be reaching, as Rodney Brooks puts it, the phase of ‘Cambrian intelligence’.) They were distinctly symbiotic, routinely sharing genetic material, effectively accessing a single gene pool.
This is the ‘microcosmos’ from which, as Lynn Margulis argues, all life has evolved, in which all life exists. The cell, of which the bacterium is the original template, is the engine, the mechanism by which energy is converted into life. The ‘web of life’ is microbial, because the microbe is the primordial engine for the transformation of energy.
More complex animals exhibit similarly symbiotic propensities as did their archaic forebears: termites host tiny organisms in their digestive tracts, coral feed with the assistance of tiny plant cells living in their flesh, humans are colonised by microbiota. The mitochondria of modern cells have their own DNA, reflecting the cell’s origins in a process of bacterial symbiogenesis. Margulis goes so far as to speculate that the ancestors of brain cells were spirochetes, fastmoving killer bacteria consumed and absorbed in a defensive move by slower archaea. Humanity, she says, is thus ‘a symbiotically evolving, globally interconnected, technologically enhanced, microbially based system’.
Capitalism subsumes these life-processes, these flows of energy, these microbial dependencies, within its own molecular flow. It subordinates them to the homogenising frame of value-production: M-C-M′. A regime of creative-destructive accumulation that is as inexhaustible as biospheric resources are finite.
image
‘Since their inception the bourgeois class has been waiting for the flood.’
—Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia
Capitalism, like certain bacteria, like the death-drive, is immortal. It has its limits and crises but, perversely, seems to thrive on these. Unlike the multi-species life-systems powering it, the only terminal limit to capital’s perpetual augmentation is, if driven towards from within, external: either revolution or human extinction; communism, or the common ruin of the contending classes.
Long ago, both Max Weber and Walter Benjamin saw an occulted religious foundation in capitalist civilisation. As Michael Löwy points out, Benjamin, by defining capitalism as a cultic religion, went much farther than Weber in identifying a Puritan/Capitalist guilt-driven imperative to accumulate. ‘The duration of the cult’, for Benjamin, ‘is permanent’. There are ‘no days which are not holidays’, and ‘nothing has meaning that is not immediately related to the cult’.
In what sense is capitalism a cult? What are its rituals, its fetishes? Those of investment, speculating, buying and selling. It has no dogma other than those ‘real abstractions’, as Alfred Sohn-Rethel put it, entailed by its rituals. In Sohn-Rethel’s words, the act of commodityexchange is the key exemplar of a social action governed by an abstraction of which the participants have no consciousness. The buyer may be concerned only with the sensuous particularities of the commodity, the needs it fills, but behaves, structurally, in the moment of exchange as though what matters is the quantity of exchange-value embedded in it. Ritual action determines dogma; social being, that is, determines consciousness.
Capitalist theology, however, instates not dogma but unyielding imperatives governing action. ‘Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!’, Marx sarcastically withered in Capital. Accumulation is, for capital, an imperative, not an option. To exist as a unit of capital in conditions of universal competition is to accumulate or die. As long, therefore, as there is labour-power to exploit and, in Jason W Moore’s term, ‘cheap nature’ to appropriate, capital will augment itself. This very bifurcation of life into the exploitable and the appropriable, which Moore identifies as the foundation of a ‘Cartesian dualism’ unsustainably counterposing ‘Nature’ to ‘Society’, is not dogma but programme. It is related to a distinctive move of capitalist theology, currently given right-Evangelical sanction by Calvin Beisner and the Cornwall Declaration, to disavow in practice the existence of inherent physical limits. It posits, in its action, the earth as limitless cornucopia over which humans have dominion, and from which limitless accumulation must be extracted.
This disavowal, this ‘real abstraction’, is the social basis of capitalist implicatory denial: the seemingly evidence-proof conviction of capitalist states that capitalogenic climate change can be remedied by means, and according to systems, that guarantee its perpetuation. The capitalocentric purview is commonly, but mistakenly, identified with the anthropocentrism of ancient and medieval monotheisms. Here, however, it is clearly not the Anthropos that stands at the centre, as though appointed by God to steward the garden of earth. At the centre is the ritual: that unconditional imperative to accumulate. And insofar as this imperative drives ‘adorers’, as Benjamin put it, to the horizon of human extinction, capitalism can – must – be described as a death cult.
Fossil capital is but one modality of the death cult, albeit a paragon. The ‘externalities’ of capital – climate chaos, biosphere destruction, resource depletion, topsoil erosion, ocean acidification, mass extinction, the accumulation of chemical, heavy metal, biological and nuclear wastes – extend far beyond the specific catastrophe of a carbonised atmosphere. Capitalism is a comprehensive system of work-energetics. The food industry, which powers waged labour, and is key to the shifting value of labour-power itself, is as central to the deterioration of the biosphere as is fossil-fuelled transit. Nonetheless, the continuing decision for fossil fuels as a solution to the energy demands of capitalist production, for all the growing denial of climate-change denial among the antivulgarian ruling class, for all their concerned mouth music, is an exemplary case of the capitalist imperative of competitive accumulation at work.
As Andreas Malm has fiercely and beautifully argued, capitalism did not settle for fossil fuels as a solution to energy scarcity. The common assumption that fossil energy is an intrinsically valuable energy resource worth competing over, and fighting wars for is, as geographer Matthew Huber argues, an example of fetishism. At the onset of steam power, water was abundant, and, even with its fixed costs, cheaper to use than coal. The hydraulic mammoths powered by water wheels required far less human labour to convert to energy, and were more energy-efficient. Even today, only a third of the energy in coal is actually converted in the industrial processes dedicated thereto: the only thing that is efficiently produced is carbon dioxide. On such basis, the striving for competitive advantage by capitalists seeking maximum market control ‘should’ have favoured renewable energy.
Capital, however, preferred the spatio-temporal profile of stocks due to the internal politics of competitive accumulation. Water use necessitated communal administration, with its perilously collectivist implications. Coal, and later oil, could be transported to urban centres, where workers were acculturated to the work-time of capitalist industry, and hoarded by individual enterprises. This allowed individual units of capital to compete more effectively with one another, secured the political authority of capital and incorporated workers into atomised systems of reproduction, from transport to heating.
Thus, locked in by the short-termist imperatives of competitive accumulation, fossil capital assumed a politically privileged position within an emerging world capitalist ecology. It monopolised the supply of energy for dead labour, albeit in a highly inefficient way.
This is the tragedy of the worker. That, as avatar of a class in itself, she was put to work for the accumulation of capital, from capitalism’s youth, amid means of production not of her choosing, and with a telos of ecological catastrophe. That thus, even should the proletariat become a class for itself, and even if it does so at a point of history where the full horror of the methods of fossil capitalism is becoming clear, it would – will – inherit productive forces inextricable from mass, trans-species death. This does not preclude systemic, planet-wide transformation. Particularly given the inevitably uneven global growth of class consciousness and resistance, however, and the concomitant embattledness of any reformist, let alone revolutionary, power on the global stage, it does ensure that it faces extraordinary barriers. As will become clear.
As of 2015, estimates suggested that humanity produced a total of 15.5 trillion watts of energy each year, of which a considerable 29 per cent was not used. At an average of 2,000 watts per person (rising to 10,000 watts in the core capitalist economies), the majority was used for industry, commerce and transit, with only 22 per cent for household consumption. Some 90 per cent of this output was powered by fossil fuels: oil, coal, gas. This monopoly, enabling superprofits as monopolies do, ensured that fossil capital would always realise profit margins far higher than the industrial average. It has, in Malm’s term, become worth a ‘planet of value’. Each fossil fuel plant represents decades of investment awaiting realisation.
To avert planetary disaster is to inflict an earth-sized blow on capitalist industry. It is to choose between burning a planet of value, and burning the planet itself. But the death cult is so strong, so pervasive, that, against all resistance, the choice has already been made.
2
Adaptations
‘I look out on the earth … lo, all is chaos;
I look at heaven … its light is gone;
I look out on the mountains … they are trembling;
And all the hills are swaying!’
—Jeremiah 4: 23-26
Apocalypse has begun. The button has been pushed. Humanity is already committed to irreversible climate change. In May of 2020, levels of CO2 in the atmosphere hit 417 parts per million, the highest ever recorded – and the first breach of 400 ppm since the Pliocene. Climate activists are, in Richard Wilbur’s phrase, ‘mad-eyed from stating the obvious’. To understand the scale of what faces us, and the way it ramifies into every corner of our lives, is to marvel that we aren’t having emergency meetings in every city, town and village every week.
We are, increasingly, out of time. In the capitalist untimelich, the time of the living and the time of the dead, human history and the history of inorganic sediments, collide. ‘Millions of years of concentrated solar energy’, as Huber calls it, have been released in an historical blink of an eye, only to rebound just as fast: the Deep Time equivalent of an asteroid strike. The cyclical time of seasons turns freakish, leaving us uneasily sweating in the clammy mid-winter. Spring comes too early, hurricane-force winds and flash floods break the October calm, polar ice melts while temperate zones are plunged into polar winter. The Arctic burns, boreal forests turned to charred sticks. The Greenland ice sheet melts even in winter. Antarctic sea ice has suddenly and drastically contracted in recent years. The polar vortex wanders, perturbed, and the mid-West freezes. In a parody of Revelations, Mediterranean storms rain fish on the island of Malta. Stochastic weather events accumulate. Birds fall dead from the sky. The progression of geological deep time, with its periods, eras and epochs speeds up so rapidly that it precipitates a crisis in the temporal order itself: spinning so fast, we may as well be standing still. The progressive time of human civilisation, reduced to the endless accumulation of stuff, collapses into nonsense. The cycle of ice ages, a necessary condition for human evolution, melts away for eternity. With awareness of which comes a wave of eco-anxiety, for which we grope for names – Glenn Albrecht’s ‘solastalgia’, Ashlee Cunsolo and Neville Ellis’s ‘ecological grief’, Renee Lertzmann’s ‘environmental melancholia’. Even at the end of 2018, 70 per cent of Americans describing themselves as ‘worried’ about climate change, and it has been a long two years for that fear to wax.
The sixth mass extinction, signalled by what one study calls ‘biological annihilation’, is underway. The oceans, which produce roughly half of the oxygen we breathe, are acidifying, and are swept by heatwaves, says a recent study, ‘like wildfire’. Coral reefs, home to a quarter of marine life, are bleaching. Insect biomass collapses, with 40 per cent of all species undergoing drastic decline. The bees, that once we believed were saved, are disappearing eight times faster than are mammals, birds or reptiles. Without their pollination work, 70 per cent of the crops that feed 90 per cent of the planet will fail.
The question of human survival is inextricable from that of what sort of humans we should be. By 2070, MIT research says, the new norm for ‘many billions’ of people will be impossibly high temperatures that will kill less fit people and make outdoor work impossible. Half a billion will experience temperatures that would ‘kill even healthy people in the shade within six hours’. The Arctic, that ‘sluggish and congealed sea’ discovered by Pytheas, a breathing ‘mixture like sea-lung’, will be gone, on conservative estimates by 2040. In 2019, the usually snow-bowed woodlands circling this uncanny sea-continent burned more fiercely than ever. Precise metrics of the scale of what will unfold are to be determined, not least by class struggle, but there is no longer, if there ever was, a choice between adaptation and mitigation.
So adapt. But to what? Those species now going extinct were once well adapted. The widely accepted geo-logism, ‘Anthropocene’, is in one sense an obvious political evasion, diluting as it does the necessary focus on capital accumulation itself. Yet, of course, capitalism is something that the human species, and no other, does. And while there are unthinkably vast disparities in power and responsibility in the production of petro-modernity, the latter has had a proven – if, crucially, hardly irrevocable – popular base: the vatic rage of activists notwithstanding, no politician has been crucified for promising fuel tax cuts.
This fact can easily be weaponised by the right. Of the recent protests of the gilets jaunes in France against declining wages and rising inequality and sparked by a rise in diesel tax later reversed by Macron faced by the scale of the protests, Trump tweeted that ‘[p]eople do not want to pay large sums of money … in order to maybe protect the environment’.
In fact, however, and allowing that the movement is hardly monolithic, the French uprising was characterised by a remarkable refusal to refuse to engage with questions of ecology, particularly compared, say, to the fuel-price protests in the UK in 2000 and 2005. Far from being characterised by ecological indifference, what characterised much of the French protest was disagreement between those for whom talk of ecology comes too soon, and those for whom such talk is inextricable from social – class – justice. One example of the former is visible in the claim of the prominent activist Jerôme Rodriguez that ‘[e]ventually, when we obtain the first things, ecology will have its place’; of the latter, the words of another, François Boulot, that ‘[t]he social and ecological emerg...

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