One of the main problems with the Oil-Value-Life chain is that human desperation anywhere becomes a threat to human life everywhere, because capital reliably conscripts the reserve army of labor into environmentally noxious work. To counteract this predatory (though impersonal) phenomenon, public power seeks to ensure that no one out there is left vulnerable and alone, dependent on capitalist vultures in order to meet their basic needs. Along with public health care, public housing is therefore the strategy’s foundation as much as electric power is. Childcare, education, and eldercare as well. And there is no life, public or otherwise, without recreation and art. A picture of a public-powered life comes into focus, and it involves a shift of collective resources toward low-carbon, high-touch care work. With more than enough doctors and nurses to go around, capitalism can’t hold your loved one’s life over your head and compel you to smuggle petrol in order to get enough money to save them, for example. No one could even justify their highly paid antisocial career with their child’s need for a good education, not if everyone’s child was entitled to a good education regardless of parental income. Perhaps this is counterintuitive, but in such a world we could all take more personal responsibility for our choices.

I strive to keep my critique mostly out of the psychological realm, but here it’s worth citing Anselm Kizza-Besigye, who argues that Western horror, even on the political left, at the idea that our access to particular consumer items might decline in a better-planned world is a reflection of geopolitical castration anxiety. Taking up the Western addiction to what he (as a Ugandan) sees as our “sad bananas,” he writes, “They can envision no good substitute for their sad bananas because the desire Westerners feel for them is not for the fruits themselves—even at their best bananas are a mid-tier tropical fruit—but for the relations of unequal exchange that enable Americans to take a disproportionate share of the world’s agricultural surplus and, with perverse glee, waste almost half of it.” I wouldn’t know how to test such a claim, but I find it quite believable. Anselm Kizza-Besigye, “Banana Republics,” Africa Is a Country, September 11, 2023.

But that’s not how Earth First! organizer Judi Bari saw it. She saw herself and her comrades as being on the side of workers—workers who might want to go fishing or camping on occasion—as opposed to the clear-cutting, job-automating timber bosses. She told an interviewer at the time, “There are very few people who think the right of a few people to make $7.00 an hour for a few more years is worth the extinction of a 10,000 year-old eco-system. I’m one of the strongest advocates for the loggers and the millworkers. I’m certainly a stronger advocate for them than their own unions are, and I’m certainly a stronger advocate for them than their employers are.”77 As she pointed out, logging jobs were few and dangerous, and they involved chopping down so many trees in the name of Value that soon there wouldn’t be any trees or logging jobs left.viii Most timber workers aligned against EF! regardless, tying yellow ribbons around their front-yard trees to signal their allegiance to the bosses. Some workers went a lot further than that, and Bari’s writings are thick with scenes of loggers punching Earth Firsters in the face in defense of their jobs. (They weren’t the only ones getting hit—Bari recounts a sign from a timber-wife counterdemonstrator: “If you take my husband’s job, he takes it out on me.”)78 Bari and EF! were right, of course, that no real analysis of workers’ interests could conclude in favor of clearcutting old-growth forest, and no conceivable public-power regime would allow it—even the American federal government ultimately didn’t—but the loggers followed their bosses’ plans. By placing jobs first, these workers ended up affirming capital.

That there’s still work to be done is dramatically clear in New York State, where public-power advocates got their win with the Build Public Renewables Act. While strategists in the Democratic Socialists of America plan for the state’s public power workers to grab hold of the planning function and trigger a worldwide cascade of social transformation, the local International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers is engaged in some of the worst planning you could possibly imagine, as a headline on the New York Focus website in June of 2022 proclaimed: ELECTRICAL WORKERS UNION FIGHTS TO EXPAND FOSSIL FUEL–POWERED CRYPTO MINING IN NEW YORK. Joined by the AFL-CIO, the IBEW lobbied Governor Kathy Hochul not to sign a bill (she did) that put a moratorium on new proof-of-work cryptocurrency mines powered by fossil fuels. Since cryptocurrencies produce zero social goods, there’s no excuse for them except to appease capital. The IBEW’s legislative council head, Addie Jenne, was clear: The crypto industry can “reignite” disinvested communities through jobs and taxes, Jenne told the Focus, and “provide buzz to attract a certain type of workforce… and attract cluster economic development.”84 It’s not the first time the state’s big unions have backed fossil fuels.ix “We need a realistic approach to meet the state’s bold climate goals and must leave every option on the table,” said the New York State AFL-CIO president, Mario Cilento, in defense of gas-powered energy plants.85

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.

One unseasonably hot day in the winter of 2022, I stepped through my door in Washington, DC, to the sound of birds screaming. At least that’s how I interpreted the racket in the trees. And I didn’t blame them. This weather must be driving the animals absolutely crazy, I thought. They can feel in their bodies that things in general are going wrong, and there’s nothing they can do about it. It took me a moment to remember that I am an animal, too, that I could feel in my body that things in general were going wrong, that the weather was driving me crazy, and that every conversation I’d have that day would start with the same avian squawk: “Can you believe how hot it is?” Even if we’d prefer to think of ourselves as the inside to animals’ outside, humans and nonhumans are stuck together in this planetary crisis.ii