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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.”
chimes with what he said during the talk in response to my question about the united healthcare ceo assassination - for capital, it's a personnel problem; it merely creates a job opening for the second in command
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
Global industrial animal production reaches apogetic heights in the American Midwest, where vertically integrated pork manufacturers intertwine their workforce and their pigs in each other’s biology to a staggering degree. For his study Porkopolis, anthropologist Alex Blanchette embedded in an Iowa pork town that births, raises, and kills millions of animals every year. What he found was not a “project of human mastery over hogs” but rather an unfolding model of modern meat that “revolves around remaking the lives and labor of human beings to make them amenable to capitalist animality.” The meat and poultry industry is difficult to mechanize and automate because, no matter how hard corporations try, it’s impossible to standardize living things. Even the largest-scale firms depend on a lot of workers to make quick and precise judgment calls about something intrinsically variable, such as where to cut a subtly individual carcass or how to sexually stimulate a particular sow for artificial insemination. Instead of humanizing the industry, this dependence has incentivized firms to industrialize people. Blanchette writes of a firm that puts potential employees through tests at the company health clinic to determine where their bodies are strongest so as to match them with the part of the pig they are best suited to repetitively disassemble. When he asked workers how the disassembly line was transforming their physiologies, “some men enthusiastically lifted up their T-shirts to reveal subtly different patterns of muscular development etched across their backs, while others showed how one of their wrists, arms, or fingers differed from others in size or shape.”33 Slaughterhouse injuries have changed, from acute maimings to the more affordable chronic muscle and nerve damage. Capital intends to get the most out of its pigs and its people, no matter if what results is gruesome and obscene.
jeez
If capitalists rob nature, and if nature undermines capital, everyone ends up broke. Where is the money supposed to come from? It’s a real concern: The World Bank called the early 2020s the “slowest half-decade of GDP growth in 30 years,” driven by timid capital investment.45 There are fanciful solutions—asteroid mining, for example, or magic software—but the likely answer is much more prosaic: us. If climate change means the future is progressively less guaranteed, then capital looks to protect itself by reducing costs instead of riskily planning to increase output or venture into new fields. For firms, that could mean consolidating with competitors, hiring consultants to “trim the fat,” wheedling subsidies out of the government, increasing prices, reducing product quality and/or quantity without changing the price, or getting customers to do some of the work for them.v But the tried-and-true way to reduce costs is to increase the rate of labor exploitation. That can be as simple as neglecting to award raises to employees fast enough to keep up with the cost of living or as dastardly as union busting or wage theft or child labor. In 2021, UNICEF and the ILO issued a joint statement warning that they had measured the first increase in decades in the number of child laborers around the world. In the United States, the Economic Policy Institute tracked ten state-level bills meant to weaken child labor protections, concluding that such efforts “are part of a coordinated campaign backed by industry groups intent on eventually diluting federal standards that cover the whole country.”46 The ILO estimates that ten million additional people fell into what it calls modern slavery between 2016 and 2021.47 By attacking the working class, capital can find a way out of its profit squeeze, and indeed we’ve seen workers and consumers rather than capitalists pay for the slowdown in growth.
i guess AI addresses this quite well, for now (both magic software and cutting costs)
Offloading costs and risks to labor and the public at large is a more viable solution for the capitalist class than a race to the bottom of the extraction barrel that would pit capitalist against capitalist and accelerate the earth’s chaotic exhaustion. Private green investments will help reduce climate change in the future, but they’re not immune to its effects now. Clean energy infrastructure doesn’t get an extreme-weather exemption—consider the unprecedented March 2024 hailstorm that smashed up a giant solar farm in Texas, leaving neighbors to worry about chemicals penetrating the water table, for example.48 Green stuff, then, is not an answer for investment capital, certainly not when it can’t lay the risks off on the public. Instead, profitable innovation means finding sustainable ways to steal from people, like generative AI software that chews up genuine creative work and spits it out again in flavorless chunks, for a fee. Constant downward pressure on the working class eventually causes people to start buckling. The wage—minus the unavoidable fees, fines, scams, and other connivances—ceases to be sufficient to reproduce people’s lives, forcing them to take extra jobs, to commit crimes themselves, to forage for food, to migrate. The price of labor drops below its cost, and capital increasingly finds its gains at the working class’s direct expense, digging into bodies like a long rope on the bare palms of someone sliding down.
[...] Major defense stocks have performed extraordinarily well in the twenty-first century, catapulting over the also vibrant S&P 500.54 And minor defense companies have had good luck being acquired by those big ones. “It’s just, sadly, a good business to be in right now, given the state of affairs in the world,” defense analyst Roman Schweizer told Defense News about the American rocket weapons industry at the end of 2023. “We don’t have enough weapons,” added Chris Brose, chief strategy officer for the defense startup Anduril, which began as a border-surveillance automation company. “That pie needs to grow, and we want to help win a share of the growing pie.”56 The market knows, on some level, that these rockets only exist to destroy people and property, but Lockheed Martin investors don’t have to factor in those costs. As far as capital is concerned, the best thing a substantial number of the world’s people can do for accumulation is get hit with an expensive American missile. It’s worth noting that the US Department of Defense is the world’s largest institutional fossil fuel user: The military and its associated industrial complex have an annual carbon bootprint the same size as the forty-five least-emitting nations combined.
lol damn