From the communist perspective, the capitalist world is split by metabolic rifts. In addition to being unsustainable on a planet with a relatively finite number of atoms, accumulative, exploitative, and extractive practices generate pathological inequality. Rifts emerge everywhere—between cities that throw away imported nutrients and rural areas that have to deal with their shit; between humans and the other animals we instrumentalize; between core countries and the periphery, mined for cheap minerals and cheap labor. “If production systems result in waste products that threaten biological reproduction and social problems that weaken the social whole, an ecological and social crisis occurs,” writes the ecofeminist thinker Carolyn Merchant. “A contradiction opens between production and reproduction.”3 The earth’s systems—including but not limited to its human systems—are superexploited and can no longer sustain themselves. (This was apparent in 1996, when Merchant published her argument, but the ravine is deeper now.) She calls for an alternative ethic of “earthcare,” one based on healing the rifts between humans and the rest of our world so that we might rejoin it as partners. And if humanity could shake off capitalism like water off a dog’s back, we could adopt a more earthcareful social metabolism without communists having to beat anyone to death with sticks, so to speak. Let us pretend for a moment that this is the case.

The police are capital’s impersonalized trigger finger, pulling on a gun pointed across borders, across property lines, across classes, and across races. They are the status quo’s heavily armed militia, designed to insulate the ruling class from popular pressure, and thus they constitute the most direct obstacle to all progressive plans for the future. The police are there to shoot you if you start acting too reasonably or too human. Communists recognize that the police (and police-like authorities) volunteer to place themselves outside the human community, and communists plan to defend themselves and their values accordingly. The Zapatistas, for example, are not commonly understood as a movement of Indigenous women practicing agroecology—similar to the NSS—even though that’s in large part what they are.50 Instead, people know them as masked militants wielding AK-47s and marching in columns through the jungle. Communists are willing to do the latter to achieve the former without too much concern about whether their actions are legitimate in the state’s eyes or not. As the communist poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht put it: “What is the use / Up to your chin in the shit, in keeping your / Fingernails clean?”51

There remains, even among the most extreme twenty-first-century communists, a strong taboo against targeting human beings for violence or negligently exposing them to harm. In my estimation, this is a product of a combination of factors that include, in addition to widespread moral humanism, a theoretical understanding that capital’s particular personnel aren’t the real problem or a source of much potential leverage in the shareholder age. Kidnapping an oil executive won’t change a lot except maybe get some of his subordinates promoted, the thinking goes. (Besides, he’ll probably insist on talking your ear off about his company’s “green” initiatives the whole time.) Communists have also tended to conclude that committing acts of violence isn’t worth the risk to themselves or to their movements and organizations, either in terms of attention from the authorities or backlash from the public. However, some have at least implied that they are reconsidering the extreme tactic of assassination. “Unlike the high Cold War when politburos, parliaments, presidential cabinets and general staffs to some extent countervailed megalomania at the top, there are few safety switches between today’s maximum leaders and Armageddon. Never has so much fused economic, mediatic and military power been put into so few hands,” wrote Mike Davis before his death, in 2022.58 Contemplating the threat posed by capricious individual leaders such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and Jair Bolsonaro, Davis suggests that we “pay homage at the hero graves of Aleksandr Ilyich Ulyanov, Alexander Berkman and the incomparable Sholem Schwarzbard”—about as close as any living left-wing American intellectual is going to get to printing “Just shoot the bastards.”

In the arson’s wake, an anarchist collective associated with the movement—the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire (in English)—released a pamphlet attempting to reckon with the deaths. “And Death Will No Longer Have Any Power: Concerning the Fire in the Marfin Bank” is a thoroughly unsatisfactory document. The collective refuses the “American army” language of “collateral damage,” but “on the other hand we will not pretend to commemorate the death of three people who, as regrettable as it was for their families, would again be a sterile news information of the system were it not the result, in the specific place and time, of a revolutionary practice.”64 The authors correctly point out that the system could never bear the same level of scrutiny, the responsibility for every accidental death produced by capitalism—never mind, I would add, the responsibility for every Alexandros Grigoropoulos—but they refuse to hold themselves and their comrades to a substantially higher standard. The struggle between communist values and capitalist Value is violent by nature, but that does not mean all consequences are justified or fall at the system’s feet. If uprising is also a kind of social planning, who wants planners who not only accidentally kill workers but also aren’t all that concerned about it? We have that, so to speak, in the fridge at home.

When they’re not hijacking capitalist tankers, communists often find themselves asking for sacrifices from people who have the least to sacrifice—it is not a social strategy that appeals to many people with the most, after all. While the other strategies rely on access to substantial flows of resources, whether state revenues or union dues, communists, as we’ve seen, worry about stocking subsistence levels of potatoes. This necessity births a lot of invention, but the mortality rate is high. It’s low-stakes to proclaim “Everything for everyone!” when you don’t have anything in the first place. And if your movement has to figuratively and sometimes literally fight for what it has all the time—including and especially primary mediations such as shelter, food, medicine, and freedom from incarceration—there’s a limit on the remainder of care left to go around, the free abundance of which is supposed to be the commune’s greatest weapon. Communes threaten to gather rather than solve capitalism’s problems, drawing together people with desperate needs and few resources to assist them. That’s what happened at the communized Sheraton in Minneapolis, which could not manage the collective discipline necessary to continue. As M. E. O’Brien writes of protest camps, “They require an enormous quantity of uncompensated collective volunteer hours, often from people who depend on the camp for their material survival while organizing.”70 That’s a delicate balance and not something that anyone can nail down in perpetuity. O’Brien concludes that the commune can’t simply spread because people next door see how well yours is working: “The structural conditions of proletarianization, market dependency, and state violence make such a vision of a revolutionary transition impossible without generalized insurrection, and leave such communities inherently unstable, inaccessible, and isolated,” she writes.71 Communism is a martial plan, and that could be unappealing to people who mistakenly believe they live in a peaceful society. Perhaps communism only seems reasonable in the mad light of unexpected fire.