Marx and the Climate Crisis #4: Marx and Environmentalism by Sean O’Brien
Lecture 4: Marx and Environmentalism
Welcome back for the final instalment in this lecture series on Marx and the Climate Crisis. We opened the lectures with a discussion of societal-nature relations, tracing a green thread of Marxian ecological thought through the Frankfurt School that remains distinct from both the production of nature thesis and the metabolic rift school of analysis. Our critical theory of nature has continued to expand and develop over the course of the series and this lecture will be no different, turning to Zehra Yaşın’s work on what she calls a “value theory of nature” (2017: 397). In the first lecture, we looked at several Marxian approaches to the concept of nature, beginning with Marx’s own writings on the subject, particularly in his mature critique of political economy. In the first Volume of Capital, we noted that Marx introduces a distinction between the labour process in general and the labour process under capitalism. The latter Marx calls the valorisation process, which sets in motion great transformations in the structure of human society that are both irrational and destructive, producing a rift in the metabolism of societal-nature relations.
We then worked through a series of Marxian interventions in the study of ecology, beginning with the work of Alfred Schmidt, whose 1962 work The Concept of Nature in Marx proved crucial in our efforts to develop a critical theory of nature. In Chapter Two, on ‘The Mediation of Nature through Society and Society through Nature’, Schmidt writes:
As a determinant of exchange-value, labour is abstract, general and undifferentiated; as a determinant of use-value it is concrete, particular and composed of many distinct modes of labour. The exchange value of a commodity has no natural content whatsoever. It is indifferent to its natural qualities because it is the embodiment of human labour in general measured by the time outlaid, and all the determinations of nature are extinguished in it. (65-66)
The capitalist form of value, Schmidt argues, “is indifferent towards the stuff of nature” (74). Exchanged as commodities, the products of labour “no longer incorporate the living interaction between men and nature, but emerge as a dead and thing-like reality, as an objective necessity by which human life is ruled, as by a blind fate” (68). This inverted reality arises from the fetish character of the commodity, in which “the natural determination of the commodity appears as social,” while “its social determination appears as an inherent natural determination” (68). In this way, he writes, “the use-value, which is a product of the direct exchange between man a nature, takes on an existence ... cut loose from any connection with its natural existence” (93).The opening lecture drew from the work of Schmidt and other critical theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to explore how “the dialectic of Enlightenment” externalizes first nature, leaving it open to ceaseless appropriation, exploitation, and depletion, a line of critique these figures extended to Marx himself as an Enlightenment figure and to the actually existing socialist projects of Eastern Europe. We then considered subsequent efforts to reclaim Marx for a Marxian ecology, weighing eco-socialist theories of “metabolic rift” and contributions to the production of nature thesis against value-theoretical approaches to societal-nature relations.
Recent work by Zehra Yaşın on the critical theory of nature has sought to escape the conceptual and political shortcomings of much Marxist environmental thought, which she argues is largely labour-centric in its account of the capital-nature relation. Distinguishing her approach from those of Schmidt, Paul Burkett, and Jason W. Moore, Yaşın proposes instead a “value theory of nature” which “locates the ecological crisis and ecological conflicts in the commodity form, not as an external outcome of this form due to the quantitative limits of nature, but as an internal aspect of the qualitative socio-ecological relation between capital and nature” (399). Yaşın draws on Diane Elson’s essay, “The Value Theory of Labour,” to circumvent an analysis of the capital-nature relation routed through the category of labour, arguing instead that it is the commodity form that “structures nature and the human–nature interaction through a socio-historically specific pattern of domination and objectification of nature” (397). Elson’s “value theory of labour,” you might recall, rejects the idea that Marx’s value theory is intended to explain the calculability of price or to prove the existence of exploitation in the labour process, insisting instead that “the object of Marx’s theory of value” is labour, and that the purpose of his critical project is to explain “why labour takes the form it does” (1979: 123).
In Yaşın’s view, this reading of Marx “opens the conceptual space for reconsidering the concept of capital in relation to a ‘value theory of nature’” (397). In other words, Yaşın’s theoretical intervention is to extend Elson’s reading of value’s form-determination of labour to the category of nature. Her theoretical approach thus “situates the historical specificity of capitalism not only in the domination of abstract labor over concrete labor and the separation of the social and nature, but also in the reproduction of the human–nature interaction in an abstract and objectified form through the commodity form” (397). The critical vantage afforded by a value theory of nature, she elaborates,
does not perceive human–nature interaction as a merely material aspect of commodity production, manifested as use-value. Rather, it distinguishes the socio-historical content of this materiality as structured through the generalization of the commodity form. In other words, use-value is not a direct product of nature or material human–nature interaction, but a historically specific product of the domination of concrete nature by the socially objectified human–nature relation. (397-8)
Theorising use-value not as a purely natural or transhistorical category, but rather as one socially mediated by the commodity form, Yaşın goes on to argue that her critical intervention has important consequences for how we understand the relationship between capitalism and the environment more broadly, particularly in relation to the reified economic categories regularly used to describe the so-called free gifts of nature. She writes:
This conceptual perspective does not presume ‘raw material’ or ‘natural resource’ as naturally or materially given, but as a social product of the specific historical form of human–nature relation established through the commodity form. […] Its point of departure is not ‘natural resource’ as use-value, but the commodity and the socio-historical form of the human–nature relation that abstracts ecology as ‘natural resource’ in the production of the commodity. In this way, it reclaims the socio-ecological essence of the ‘natural resource’. (398)
There are wide-ranging theoretical implications of such an approach to societal-nature relations, not least the impetus to historicize the nature/society dualism itself as a product of capitalist modernity, and therefore a move away from any claim that nature or reality as such should be seen as somehow inherently dialectical.
In the second lecture, we pivoted from the inquiry into societal-nature relations to address the problem of energy. Drawing on work in the Energy Humanities, we took a detailed look at concepts such as energy deepening, energy transition, and energy impasse, noting that the Marxist critique of energy attends to the way energy and its use have been form-determined by value, as well as how energy itself is form-giving, shaping as well as fuelling the accumulation of capital, even as value remains relatively indifferent to the materiality of energy sources. We focused, in lecture two, on the role energy plays in both the climate crisis and the reproduction of capital. We also asked why energy has consistently been overlooked or underplayed in historical accounts of capitalist modernity. Reading energy back into the history of capitalism, we saw, is about more than simply accounting for the fact that two centuries of burning dirty fuel sources in factories has released catastrophic levels of CO2 into the atmosphere, or that coal and oil have been at the heart of modern imperialist military ventures.
Centring energy in the history of capitalism, we noted, is rather to recast capitalist modernity as “petromodernity,” a term Stephanie LeMenager uses to describe “a modern life based in the cheap energy systems long made possible by petroleum” (60), and thus to understand modern subjects as “petrosubjects” who, as Jeff Diamanti and Imre Szeman argue, “inhabit a petroculture of quickened time and expanded space that requires oil to make it flow” (143). To better understand this concept of “petroculture,” we turned to the work of the Petrocultures Research Group, who write:
We use this term to emphasize the ways in which post-industrial society today is an oil society through and through. It is shaped by oil in physical and material ways, from the automobiles and highways we use to the plastics that permeate our food supply and built environments. Even more significantly, fossil fuels have also shaped our values, practices, habits, beliefs, and feelings. These latter can be difficult to parse. It might be easy to point to a highway interchange and understand its relationship to our oil culture, but it is much harder to name and isolate the ideals of autonomy and mobility, for instance, that are just as strongly linked to the historical conditions of a fossil fuel society. In a very real way, these values are fuelled by fossil fuels, as are so many of the other values and aspirations that we have come to associate with the freedoms and capacities of modern life. It is in this sense that we are a petroculture; and it is for this reason, too, that transitioning from fossil fuels to other sources of energy will require more than new energy technologies. We will need to transform and transition our cultural and social values at the same time. (9-10)
Building on this work in the Energy Humanities, we then traced the historical formation of our modern petroculture through the concepts of energy transition, which names both the emergence of what Andres Malm calls “fossil capital” and the aspirational horizon of a post-carbon future (13); energy deepening, which describes a rise in the ratio of energy inputs relative to human labour; and energy impasse, which names the absence of any given path out of the climate emergency, and therefore invites us to reconsider not only what a transition from fossil fuels might look like but also, and by extension, how human society might be reorganised.
Lecture three then moved to confront what is arguably the greatest issue of our age, the consequence of a carbon-soaked capitalism, and the terrain on which environmentalist struggles over energy transition play out: climate change. We began with a critical account of recent theoretical developments on the concept of the ‘Anthropocene’, a name coined by environmental scientists to describe a new geological era in which human activity has come to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems. We then turned to Marxian counter proposals from environmental geographer Jason W. Moore and ecofeminist philosopher Donna J. Haraway, who suggest we might more accurately name this geological period the “capitalocene,” a conceptual intervention that reconceives of capital accumulation as a way of organizing nature as a multispecies, situated, capitalist world-ecology. Following from these insights, the lecture concluded by asking where our warming world is headed. We asked what the political and economic consequences will be if we fail to reduce rates of carbon emissions sufficiently to keep future heating levels below the critical 2°C threshold. Turning briefly to the work of Mike Davis on global climate patterns and the political economy of famine in the global south, we closed by considering the related and increasingly pressing issue of climate refugees through Marx’s category of relative surplus population.
This fourth and final lecture departs from the current “energy impasse” to ask how a contemporary environmental politics might address the obstacles that stand in the way of human and nonhuman flourishing. We begin with a brief history of the environmental movement as it is commonly understood before turning to review a series of critical interventions, including Richard White’s ‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’, Joan Martinez-Alier’s The Environmentalism of the Poor, and Chad Montrie’s A People’s History of Environmentalism in the United States, all of which challenge core assumptions of the dominant historical narrative. The lecture then turns its attention to current developments in the politics of environmentalism, examining first the move from issue-based sustainability initiatives to the total crisis of climate change before moving to consider debates between green growth proponents and degrowth theorists. From here, the lecture pivots to consider what the critique of economic growth can teach us about environmental politics in an age of climate crisis. Drawing on recent Marxist contributions to environmentalism, the lecture concludes with a discussion of the politics of nature and how it has been taken up in contemporary approaches to the climate emergency.
***
Conventional accounts of the environmental movement tend to locate its historical emergence and development largely in the United States, highlighting the pivotal role played by the publication of Rachel Carson’s widely influential book, Silent Spring, in 1962, and then the first Earth Day, held in 1970, with honourable mentions given to the founding of Greenpeace in Vancouver and the advent of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the United Kingdom. The story usually goes something like this: In 1962, Rachel Carson, a marine biologist and conservationist, published Silent Spring, a groundbreaking exposé on the dangers of chemical pesticides, particularly DDT. The American conservationist movement had already been granted substantial momentum after the publication of A Sand County Almanac in 1949 by the ecologist and forester, Aldo Leopold. Leopold’s collection of essays, written in the naturalist tradition of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, promotes what Leopold calls a “land ethic,” calling for an end to the commodification of nature and for an ecologically responsible relationship to inhabited land. Like A Sand County Almanac, Carson’s Silent Spring reflects the land ethic’s core principle: understanding and preserving a balance with nature. Her data-driven research revealed how the chemicals used in pesticides were not only harming insects but also poisoning birds, fish, and other wildlife, with long-term repercussions for human health and the environment, while her provocative argument and literary style brought scientific findings to a broader audience, painting a haunting image of a “silent spring” devoid of birdsong due to widespread pesticide use.
Carson’s work challenged powerful chemicals companies and inspired a national conversation about the ethics of unchecked technological progress. The public outcry prompted by Silent Spring led to significant policy changes, including the eventual ban on DDT in the US in 1972. The book is widely regarded as a catalyst for the modern environmental movement and set the stage for the formation of regulatory bodies like the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. Building on the growing momentum around conservationism, the first Earth Day was held on April 22, 1970, and was heralded as a decisive development in modern environmentalism and ecological activism. US Senator Gaylord Nelson, distressed by the lack of political attention to environmental issues, conceived the idea of a national teach-in to mobilize public concern. With the help of eco-activist Denis Hayes, Earth Day became a massive popular event, drawing 20 million Americans from a range of political, social, and economic backgrounds to participate in rallies, demonstrations, and educational programs. The event highlighted pressing issues such as air and water pollution, deforestation, toxic waste, and wildlife extinction, calling for comprehensive environmental legislation. The energy of Earth Day 1970 translated into what appeared to many to be significant political achievements. Within a few years, landmark environmental laws were enacted, including the Clean Air Act (1970), the Clean Water Act (1972), and the Endangered Species Act (1973). These laws provided a framework for addressing pollution and protecting ecosystems through legislation, while the creation of the EPA centralized federal efforts to regulate environmental impacts.
Together, the story goes, Silent Spring and the first Earth Day represent watershed moments in US environmentalism. Carson’s book awakened the general public to the dangers of human interference in natural systems, while Earth Day channelled that awareness into action and policy. These events not only transformed environmentalism into a powerful social and political movement but also established enduring principles of sustainability and ecological responsibility that continue to shape US environmental policy and global efforts to protect the planet. Around the same time, Greenpeace emerged as an independent environmental organization dedicated to protecting the natural world and promoting sustainability. Founded in 1971 by a small group of Canadian and American activists in Vancouver, Greenpeace’s first mission was to protest US nuclear testing at Amchitka Island in Alaska, fearing its impact on the local ecosystem and wildlife. Borrowing a fishing boat, the Phyllis Cormack, they sailed toward the test site in an act of nonviolent direct action, though they were intercepted before reaching their destination. The protest gained international attention, eventually inspiring a global movement, and the organisation spread. Combining ecological advocacy with dramatic, media-savvy actions, Greenpeace soon expanded its focus to include issues such as whaling, toxic pollution, deforestation, and climate change. Its iconic tactics, such as confronting whaling ships and blocking industrial dumping, became hallmarks of environmental activism. Greenpeace formalized as an organization in 1972, adopting a name that reflected its dual commitment to peace and the environment. Over the decades, it has grown into a powerful global network, influencing public opinion and policy through campaigns, research, and direct action, cementing its role as a leader in environmental advocacy. The organisation operates independently, refusing funding from governments, corporations, or political parties to maintain its autonomy. Its high-profile, direct-action tactics have become synonymous with the group.
We might add to this narrative the development of more radical environmental movements, such as the anarchist ecological movements that emerged in the late 20th century, which combine political principles of autonomy and anti-authoritarianism with guerilla tactics and economic sabotage, fighting for the protection of nature against systems of environmental destruction. These green anarchist movements are largely decentralized, often comprised of autonomous cells, and employ militant techniques such as property destruction or “ecotage.” One of the most notable groups within this tradition is the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), which originated in Brighton in the early 1990s as an offshoot of Earth First! ELF then spread throughout Europe and then across the world, engaging in acts of “monkeywrenching” to disrupt industries that are harmful to the environment, including logging, fossil fuels, and urban sprawl. Tactics included property destruction, arson, and sabotage, with a strict policy of avoiding harm to human or animal life. Their goal was to draw attention to ecological crises and inflict financial costs on destructive industries. Other movements, such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), often overlapped with ELF in their direct-action strategies, targeting industries like factory farming and animal testing. Together, these groups adopted a philosophy of “leaderless resistance,” with anonymous cells operating independently but united by shared goals and strategies. If anarchist eco-movements have been praised for spotlighting urgent ecological issues, they have also faced significant backlash and legal action. Governments and corporations have labelled their actions as “eco-terrorism,” leading to extensive surveillance, infiltration, and prosecution. Despite the repression, these movements have influenced broader environmental activism, emphasizing the urgency of radical solutions to ecological degradation and challenging mainstream environmental groups to address deeper systemic issues.
While the inclusion of these radical movements might represent a welcome correction to the liberal narrative of progress one often encounters in the history of modern environmentalism, several historians and political ecologists have sought to challenge the conventional account of environmentalism from a workerist point of view, contesting assumptions commonly held by mainstream environmentalists about the relationship between labour and nature or the idea that environmentalism was driven by the increased leisure and wealth of an educated middle class. Richard White’s ‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’ is exemplary in this regard. Taking the title of his 1990 essay from a bumper sticker he saw on the back of a truck in a logging town in Washington state, White’s essay explores the deep entanglement of labour and nature, challenging the ways leading environmentalists have historically framed this relationship. His aim, he writes, is to “reexamine the connections between work and nature,” which “form perhaps the most critical elements in our current environmental crisis” (171-2). White’s essay offers an early interrogation of environmentalism’s dualisms—nature vs. humanity, labour vs. leisure—asserting that such binaries are based in pastoral idealism and a technophobic primitivism, and that they distort our understanding of both work and the natural world. His critique of the neoliberal “wise use” movement, with its “single minded devotion to propertied interests” (174), departs from the observation that it appeared at the time to be one of the only strands of environmentalism addressing the relation between work and nature. White describes the movement’s emphasis on environmental stewardship through private ownership as a reduction of environmental concerns to economic utility, but he’s ultimately more concerned with its disregard of the deeper, more nuanced interplay between labour and the environment.
Central to White’s critique is the environmentalist tendency to romanticize nature as pristine until “spoiled” by human labour, especially manual labour. This framing, White contends, often misrepresents the labour of working-class people while exempting the intellectual or leisure-driven work of the environmentalists themselves. Sounding a bit like Marx, White emphasizes that labour—the human exchange with nature—does not only degrade; it is also the way humans come to know and shape both nature and themselves. Drawing on the work of Elaine Scarry—a figure also important for Søren Mau—White argues that tools and labour extend the human body into the natural world, creating a dynamic interplay that transforms nature and humanity. White critiques settler colonial fantasies perpetuated by environmentalists such as Bill McKibben, who invoke “first white man” tropes to romanticize an original, lost harmony between humans and nature based in the absence of work and the ubiquity of leisure. These narratives, White argues, ignore the labour of Indigenous peoples who had long shaped the landscapes these settlers encountered. In doing so, these colonialist fantasies portray labour as a serpent in the garden of Eden, corrupting an otherwise idyllic natural world of universal leisure. He writes:
“it is not nature that exists outside human history; it is the first white men who do so. For environmentalist writers depict not how these travellers actually saw the natural world but instead how we would have seen it in their place. In this construction the first white men travel through nature untouched by human labor and are awed by it” (176).
This story, White argues, is clearly false: settlers did not merely marvel at nature’s beauty but actively engaged with it through labour practices such as surveying, a process through which they came to know the land (this work, of course, was central to indigenous genocide, a point conspicuously absent from White’s intervention).
In another version of the story, which White identifies with the work of Wendell Berry, labour is permitted a place in paradise so long as it remains a harmonious encounter and metabolic exchange between humans and nature, that is, until modern technology enters the frame. In place of the racialized narrative of the first white men, you get the gendered account of feminised white-collar work replacing “manly work” via the introduction of machines. In this narrative, the historical fact of deskilling and the alienation from nature that mechanization entails are transformed into a moralising tale. White calls this kind of environmentalism “gardening” (179). White’s essay demonstrates how mainstream environmentalism effectively offers up what he describes as a “choice between condemning all work in nature” or “sentimentalising vanishing forms of work,” or, put differently, “a romanticism of inviolate nature” or “a romanticism of local work” and a “demonising of machines” (181-82). Both narratives fundamentally misunderstand the relationship between labour and nature. As White puts it:
Most humans must work, and our work—all our work—inevitably embeds us in nature, including what we consider wild and pristine places. Environmentalists have invited the kind of attack contained in the Forks bumper sticker by identifying nature with leisure, [and] by masking the environmental consequences of their own work. To escape it, and perhaps even to find allies among people unnecessarily made into enemies, there has to be some attempt to come to terms with work. Work does not prevent harm to the natural world—Forks itself is evidence of that—but if work is not perverted into a means of turning place into property, it can teach us how deeply our work and nature’s work are intertwined. (185)
For White, as for Marx, labour should not be seen as a necessarily destructive activity; it becomes so when commodified and transformed into a means of valorising value, which requires turning nature into private property. Properly understood, labour reveals the deep imbrication of humanity and nature, underscoring how inseparable they are. White criticizes the way environmentalism distances itself from the labour from which it benefits, allowing its adherents to claim a false innocence while indicting those whose livelihoods directly alter nature. As a result, he writes, we “condemn ourselves to spending most of our lives outside of nature, for there can be permanent place for us inside. Having demonised those whose very lives recognise the tangled complexity of a planet in which we kill, destroy and alter as a condition of living and working, we can claim an innocence that in the end is merely irresponsibility” (185). White pushes for a reckoning with work: an acknowledgment that labour embeds humanity in the natural world, shaping and being shaped by it. Ignoring this relationship, White warns, isolates humans from the natural world and alienates workers from the environmental movement.
Like White’s influential polemic, Chad Montrie’s A People’s History of Environmentalism in the United States aims to offer a leftist corrective to the standard story of environmentalism, framing it as a grassroots effort rooted in the everyday struggles of working-class communities rather than as a movement led solely by elite conservationists or environmental organizations. His book challenges the traditional narrative of environmentalism by focusing on the contributions of ordinary people—farmers, workers, and activists—who fought for cleaner air, safer workplaces, and sustainable land use long before “environmentalism” became a formalized cause. Montrie argues that environmental activism in the US has historically been driven by the dispossessed, who have sought to address immediate, local threats to their health and livelihoods. From industrial workers demanding protection from toxic pollution to African American communities fighting environmental racism, these struggles were integral to the broader environmental movement. His research explores how environmentalism intersected with the labour and civil rights movements, noting that unionized workers advocated for workplace safety regulations that also benefited the broader environment, while civil rights activists opposed discriminatory policies that exposed racialised communities to hazardous toxins and pollutants. Reframing the American history of environmentalism, A People’s History of Environmentalism in the United States broadens the narrative lens to include farmers resisting soil degradation during the Dust Bowl, urban residents protesting air and water pollution, and Indigenous nations defending their lands from industrial exploitation. His book critiques the mainstream environmental movement for focusing disproportionately on wilderness preservation while often ignoring urban and industrial environmental issues affecting working-class and racialised populations.
Montrie’s work is a call to recognize the diverse and interconnected history of environmental activism in the United States. By centring the voices of labouring and dispossessed populations, he reveals how environmentalism has always been intertwined with distributional conflicts over access to life-making resources. This reframing challenges readers to view the environmental movement not as an elite-driven phenomenon but as a dynamic fight for a liveable planet. In this sense, Montrie’s work might be read as a contribution to the study of what is known as “the environmentalism of the poor,” a concept popularized by economist Joan Martinez-Alier, which highlights how impoverished communities around the world resist environmental degradation caused by extractive industries and resource exploitation. Unlike mainstream environmentalism, which often focuses on conservation or aggregate emissions targets, this form of environmentalism is rooted in the defence of livelihoods, lands, and local ecosystems. Martinez-Alier argues that these struggles arise from conflicts over resource use, where powerful actors prioritize profit and development at the expense of vulnerable populations. These communities, often in the Global South, fight to protect their environments because their survival depends directly on access to clean water, fertile land, forests, and fisheries. This environmentalism integrates ecological concerns with issues like inequality, cultural preservation, and indigenous rights. It challenges conventional economic metrics like GDP, advocating instead for concepts such as ecological debt and environmental justice to account for the true costs of environmental harm. In this way, “the environmentalism of the poor” reframes environmental activism as deeply interconnected with social struggles, emphasizing how the protection of nature is inseparable from the defence of the lives and well-being of the global dispossessed.
Rob Nixon expands on the concept of the “environmentalism of the poor” in his influential book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), which we discussed briefly in lecture two on the belated and distended temporalities of environmental crises. Nixon introduces the idea of slow violence, we noted, which is his name for a form of violence that occurs gradually, invisibly, and over extended periods of time, disproportionately affecting vulnerable communities in the global south. Unlike spectacular acts of violence that garner immediate media attention, slow violence is caused by environmental degradation, climate change, toxic pollution, and other processes that erode ecosystems, habitable landscapes, and livelihoods over time. Nixon connects slow violence to the environmentalism of the poor by highlighting how vulnerable communities bear the brunt of these long-term crises. He argues that their struggles are often overlooked because slow violence lacks the immediacy of catastrophic events. He also emphasizes the role of narrative and advocacy in making slow violence perceptible to wider audiences. By documenting the stories of affected communities and using media, literature, and art, he argues, activists and writers can draw attention to the hidden, long-term consequences of environmental harm and systemic inequality. Nixon’s work broadens the scope of environmentalism by urging a focus on the temporal and spatial scales of environmental crises, which points to mediations between local, issue-based ecological struggles, which dominated the early environmental movement, and the total crisis of climate change. His concept of slow violence registers the temporal belatedness of the fossil economy and its environmental consequences. “Incremental and accretive” (2), slow violence defines the relationship between economic growth and carbon emissions, and so invites us to consider one of the most influential developments in contemporary environmentalism.
As the climate crisis gathers steam, a heated debate has ignited on the environmentalist left over the question of economic growth. Ecosocialists contend that growth can benefit the working class and be brought into balance with the ecosystem if the economy is subject to socialist planning, while others promote green growth strategies such as a “People’s Green New Deal.” Proponents of degrowth have intervened in this discussion to argue that, as carbon emissions appear to rise and fall with rates of economic growth, efforts should focus not on greening growth but on transitioning to a “post-growth” society. Advocates of post-growth living claim that abandoning the growth paradigm will enable human society not only to escape the climate catastrophe but to cultivate a more fulfilling life. Dissatisfied with this argument, ecomodernists insist that degrowth amounts to a kind of austerity and fails to appreciate the promethean capacity for resilience and innovation. Degrowth advocates counter that their project is not primarily about shrinking GDP but reducing material and energy throughput, while also stressing the inadequacies of GDP as a measure of wellbeing.
Of particular interest for us here is Japanese philosopher and Marxist political ecologist Kohei Saito’s argument that Marx’s late writings promote a vision of what Saito calls “degrowth communism,” moving away from the productivist models of revolutionary socialist transformation found in Marx’s earlier work. Saito bases his argument on a reading of Marx’s lesser-known writings collected in the MEGA, including several drafts of his 1881 letter to the Russian revolutionary writer Vera Zasulich, where Marx defends the possibility of an immediate Russian revolution based on the agrarian commune that could bypass the capitalist stage of industrialisation in Russia. According to Saito,
Marx’s call for returning to the archaic type in the letter to Zasulich is not a careless and arbitrary one. By the 1880s Marx recognized that the persistent stability of communes without economic growth is the underlying foundation for realizing sustainable and egalitarian metabolic interaction between humans and nature. This marks a clear contrast to Marx’s previous negative comments on the stationary state and invariability of the Asian communes in the 1850s and even in volume I of Capital. This is how these two seemingly irrelevant research fields of natural science and communes prove tightly interwoven in Marx’s abandonment of his earlier historical materialism. After 14 years of research, he concluded that sustainability and equality based on a steady-state economy is the source of power to resist capitalism, and it would be no wonder should Russian communes skip the capitalist stage to arrive at communism. It is also this kind of sustainability and equality of the steady-state economy [to which] Western societies consciously need to ‘return’ as a higher form of the archaic type as a solution to the crisis of capitalism. In short, Marx’s last vision of post-capitalism is degrowth communism. (208)
While this reading of Marx has unsurprisingly proven controversial amongst many Marxists and Marxologists, the concept of degrowth has become widely popular on the left, sparking a flurry of exchanges between its proponents and critics. This debate has arguably generated more heat than light. As Jack Copley writes, both defenders and detractors of degrowth tend to “treat economic growth voluntaristically, as a goal that can be prioritized or deprioritized.” But growth is not simply a switch that can be turned on or off at will. Growth, Copley argues, is better understood as “an unconscious effect of the operation of capitalism – a system with an historical tendency towards waning dynamism” (430). Waning economic dynamism poses significant challenges to decarbonization, as it not only disincentivizes green investment but also puts pressure on national governments to stimulate growth whatever the cost. But what exactly is degrowth?
When people think critically about economic growth these days, it’s usually in relation to climate change, or to point out problems with how GDP measures growth, or to argue that GDP growth is not actually a good index for measuring human wellbeing in the first place. These lines of critique converge on the idea of “degrowth.” In Jason Hickel’s words, degrowth involves “a planned downscaling of energy and resource use to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a safe, just and equitable way” (22). The degrowth movement aims to transition to a “post-growth” society in which people work less, produce less, consume less and generally live simpler, less carbon-intensive lives. Degrowth emerged as a response to the environmental, social, and economic challenges posed by the global emphasis on economic growth, or what is often called “the growth paradigm.” The growth paradigm is a dominant economic and societal framework that prioritizes continuous economic growth—measured in GDP—as the central goal of governments, businesses, and international institutions. It assumes that economic expansion is essential for improving living standards, creating jobs, and fostering technological progress. This paradigm has shaped global policy and development for much of the modern era, particularly since the mid-20th century. The movement draws its inspiration in part from the Club of Rome’s 1972 report, The Limits to Growth, which used computational modelling to demonstrate that exponential economic and population growth will inevitably come up against the hard planetary limits of a finite supply of resources. This scenario is called the “limits-to-growth dilemma,” and it has featured as a prominent rallying point in Extinction Rebellion protests, where activists have advocated for national governments not only to accept that there are, in fact, absolute environmental and ecological limits to economic growth, but also to actively impose limits on the expansion of their respective national economies – a potentially radical demand in a world in which, since World War II, GDP growth has been considered the decisive indicator of a country’s overall welfare.
The origins of degrowth can be traced to a Malthusian pessimism about the carrying capacities of the planet, particularly during the environmental awakening of the 1960s and 1970s. This is the period, of course, that saw the publication of influential works highlighting the dangers of unchecked industrial activity. Around the same time the Club of Rome released the Meadow Reports, E.F. Schumacher published Small is Beautiful, which emphasized the importance of sustainable, human-centred economics. In Part IV on the theory of large scale organisation, Schumacher argues that:
Socialists should insist on using the nationalised industries not simply to out-capitalise the capitalists – an attempt in which they may or may not succeed – but to evolve a more democratic and dignified system of industrial administration, a more humane employment of machinery, and a more intelligent utilization of the fruits of human ingenuity and effort. If they can do this, they have the future in their hands. If they cannot, they have nothing to offer that is worthy of the sweat of free-born men. (219)
Meanwhile, philosophers like Ivan Illich critiqued industrial society’s obsession with productivity and efficiency, advocating instead for conviviality and community-oriented lifestyles. His critique of the modern use of tools has proven influential for contemporary theorists interested in the defence of vernacular subsistence against the industrialized satisfaction of needs. These early critiques laid the foundation for what would later become the degrowth movement.
The term “degrowth” (or décroissance) gained prominence in France during this period in the early 1970s, championed by thinkers such as André Gorz and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. The word degrowth was first formulated in 1972 during a debate organized by the Le Nouvel Observateur, in which Gorz questioned the logical coherence of sustainable development under capital, asking: “Is global balance, which is conditional upon non-growth—or even degrowth—of material production, compatible with the survival of the (capitalist) system?” Georgescu-Roegen’s work in ecological economics, particularly his book The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, argued that economic systems are constrained by the Earth’s physical and ecological limits. Degrowth thus emerged as a direct critique of GDP-focused development, highlighting its failure to account for environmental finitude and planetary sustainability, marking the beginning of a more formalized challenge to the growth-driven economic paradigm. By the early twenty-first century, degrowth had become a distinct socio-political and academic phenomenon. The movement gained momentum with the first International Degrowth Conference, held in Paris in 2008, which brought together academics, activists, and policymakers to explore and promote degrowth principles. Subsequent conferences in Barcelona (2010), Venice (2012), and Leipzig (2014) helped to broaden the movement’s global reach, fostering a growing community of advocates committed to rethinking economic and societal priorities.
So, what is growth? Economic growth is conventionally associated with prosperity, improvements in health and wellbeing, access to education, nutrition, social connections, and even things like respect, peace, human rights, a healthy environment, and happiness. Capitalism is associated with historically unprecedented rates of economic growth. Although there is some debate as to when modern economic growth takes off in earnest, most economists trace the beginning of its exponential ascent to the industrial revolution. The standard definition of economic growth is that is measures the increase in the market value of goods and services produced by an economy over time. But there are problems with literally every aspect of this definition: what unit of time to use, how to delineate the borders of a national economy, what counts as a good or service, how to adjust for inflation, and what metrics to use to measure growth are all contentious questions within mainstream economics. Ever since the British political economist William Petty conducted the first ever survey of national wealth, the notorious “Down Survey,” in Ireland in the mid-seventeenth century, modern economic thought has been preoccupied by the quantitative measurement of wealth. Following revolutionary developments in statistics and accounting, as well as the emergence of Newtonian theories of abstract, homogenous time, Petty’s “Down Survey” gave rise to the modern “growth paradigm,” placing quantification at the centre of the dismal science.
But it’s only in the twentieth century, with the introduction of the Gross National Product (GNP), that Petty’s project is properly realized. Developed by the American economist Simon Kuznets amidst the turmoil of the Great Depression, GNP offered a systematic method for assessing the state of the national economy and its performance over time. Kuznets’s model was, in fact, fairly simple, which was part of its appeal. As Lorenzo Fioramonti writes, the idea was to “generate a set of aggregate measures capable of condensing all economic production by individuals, companies and the government into a single number, which should rise in good times and fall in bad” (25-6). Despite its apparent neutrality, however, the implementation of GNP accounting in the twentieth century needs to be understood in relation to political developments in the US, beginning with FDR’s need for a reliable method to monitor the impact of New Deal policies during the Great Depression. The political significance of a system of national accounts only increased with the outbreak of World War II. The wartime economy required top-down control over the production process and, as Fioramonti argues, GNP “allowed for the conversion of the civilian economy into a war machine without hampering internal consumption” (10). After the conflict, GNP became a weapon in the emerging stats war between the US and the USSR, and quickly became associated with narratives of infinite growth, which was one of capital’s chief ideological tools in the Cold War struggle for geopolitical dominance. With the fall of communism, the system of national accounting was exported around the world. Globalization entailed the shift from GNP to GDP, effectively providing cover for multinational companies extracting profits from the Global South, but the expansion of the world market also made the fantasy of infinite economic growth a truly global phenomenon.
Of course, GDP has been subject to longstanding critique, including by Kuznets himself, who argued that, while a system of national accounts was important in periods of crisis, its adoption in peacetime as a measure of general social wellbeing was largely misguided, since it externalized important social metrics and had its own internal limits and blind spots. Nevertheless, what Joseph Stiglitz has called “GDP fetishism” only continued its rise to global dominance in the decades since Kuznets introduced his system of national accounts. In Fioramonti’s words, the period since World War II “has been the era of GDP. The era of national accounts and infinite growth. The era of economic performance and sustained mass consumption. The era of greenhouse gases and climate change” (80). By the twenty-first century, then, GDP, with its fantasy of infinite growth, had become a veritable “model of society,” as Fioramonti writes, “thereby influencing not only economic but also political and cultural processes” (10). But early theories of growth and development had very different ideas about the long-term prospects for economic expansion.
Modern theories of economic growth begin with Adam Smith, who argued that a specialized division of labour would allow national economies to steadily increase productivity. Smith proposed that, while an increasing demand for labour would drive wages up and put a squeeze on profits, higher wages would also lessen child mortality, effectively increasing the supply of labour and thereby regulating the labour market. This is the engine of Smith’s “growth machine.” It is David Ricardo, however, who is considered the founding figure of classical growth theory. The Ricardian theory of economic growth is based on what he calls “the law of diminishing returns,” whereby increases in the amount of either labour or capital in the production process will increase output, so long as the other remains constant, but at a diminishing rate that will eventually approach zero. From the outset, then, modern economic theory does not assume a model of infinite growth, but instead expects something like what is now called “secular stagnation” to set in at a certain point in the trajectory of capitalist development.
With the discovery of fossil fuels, conceptions of natural limits began to disappear from the models. The abundance of low-cost energy, first in the form of coal and then oil, pushed concerns about resource exhaustion to the background, giving way to ideas of expansion without physical limits. But it is really only in the mid-twentieth century, as the historian Christopher Jones has argued, that that the new model of growth emerges in earnest, particularly in the work of American economist Robert Solow, whose growth model removes any reference to the natural world and is therefore able to posit economic growth as infinite. In contrast, economic modelling from Smith through Ricardo to John Stuart Mill repeatedly predicted that advanced capitalist development would lead to stagnating levels of economic growth. For classical political economists like Smith, national economies were destined to settle into what he called a “stationary state” sooner or later due to the scarcity of natural resources. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith describes stationarity as a “dull” state in which life for the labouring population is “hard” bordering on “miserable” (184). Ricardo and Mill would go on to revise this concept in their own ways, with Mill famously rejecting Smith’s pessimistic view on the stationary state in favour of a more optimistic outlook on the prospects of stationarity. But all agreed that growth is indeed limited and that, at some point, all economies would inevitably reach a level of development beyond which further expansion would prove impossible.
But now, after decades of infinite growth rhetoric, the protracted decline in economic growth rates has prompted none other than former US Secretary to the Treasury Larry Summers to suggest that there’s been “something odd” about the low growth rates dogging the economic recovery, and to propose a cautious return to “a set of older ideas that went under the phrase secular stagnation.” Macroeconomists use the term secular (or long-term) stagnation to describe persistent negligible economic growth rates that exceed the peaks and troughs of the business cycle, trending downwards on the whole. The theory of secular stagnation was originally proposed by the Keynesian economist Alvin Hansen during the Great Depression to account for persistent low growth rates, high unemployment, and what he described as “weak and anaemic” recoveries that “die in their infancy.” Largely forgotten during the post-war boom, as economic maturity came to be associated with prosperity and growth, economists have recently revived this “macroeconomic heresy” to explain the unusually sluggish performance of the US economy since the 2008 crash.
Secular stagnation poses significant challenges to decarbonization. Reaching the goals of the Paris Agreement requires a rapid decarbonization of the global economy. Governments and international organizations have therefore pushed for a significant increase in private investment in renewables, facilitated and coordinated by state intervention. As Jack Copley has argued, however, this drive for renewable energy investment faces a difficult obstacle: the persistent stagnation of the global economy since the 1970s, when the advanced capitalist economies transitioned from a period of unprecedented economic expansion to one marked by overcapacity and overproduction, sluggish investment and weak growth rates. In Copley’s view, decarbonization poses several dilemmas to political economy. While slow economic growth can reduce carbon emissions by curbing energy demand, it also hinders progress in energy efficiency. Economic stagnation disincentivises the adoption of costly decarbonized industrial processes. Investment in most renewable energy sources has been largely inadequate, but even the rapid expansion of solar photovoltaics, a notable exception, has come up against the hard limits of overcapacity. And stagnation destabilizes political institutions, pressuring governments to prioritize economic growth, sometimes at the expense of environmental considerations. This “involuntary degrowth,” Copley writes, “is the contradictory terrain that states must traverse as they seek to decarbonize the downturn.”
There’s more to say about degrowth and the problem of slowing growth, not least the all too easy assumption that the imperative for expansion amongst individual capitals necessarily translates into a generalized growth pattern, or the patently false idea that ecological ruin occurs primarily due to runaway economic dynamism. There are also a number of recent developments I’d have liked to discuss in the contemporary politics of environmentalism, from indigenous blockades of oil pipeline expansion projects and their relation to the predominance of circulation struggles under conditions of slow growth, to eco-feminist movements across the global south that have emerged in response to ongoing primitive accumulation, as well as the infiltration of climate justice movements by spy cops here in the UK. But I want to conclude this lecture series with a brief look at a recent article by Jacob Blumenfeld, which proposes an environmental politics based on what he calls “the socialisation of nature.” Blumenfeld delineates three strategical approaches to “the politics of nature in a burning world.” The first he calls “the legislation of nature,” which aims “to give enforceable rights to nature that can be defended by stewards, advisors, or trustees in a court of law.” One could see not only wise-use and conservationism corresponding to this approach, but also much of the mainstream environmental movement, with its focus on rights and regulatory protections. Blumenfeld’s second strategy he calls “the moralisation of nature,” the purpose of which he argues is “to develop normative guidelines that can orient action towards our threatened environmental conditions of existence, for our sake and for the sake of other living things.” Such a strategy would entail the creation of “new moral concepts, frameworks and values for relating to nature, land and the biosphere in general.” We might think here of certain strands of work in the Energy Humanities, which see energy transition not primarily as a question of technological innovation or policy changes, but more as a matter of transforming cultural and social values. We can also include advocates of “post-growth” living, with their calls for a renewed vision of the good life.
While legalisation offers a means to protect the environment through the creation of legally enforceable rights granted to nature, these efforts not only fail to challenge the property relations that govern societal-nature relations, but may in fact reinscribe them through the extension of ownership for conservation or even in the creation of new forms of green capital. And though the moralisation strategy might correct for some of the shortcomings of formal or “external” legal frameworks by focusing efforts on the transformation of subjective or “internal” value systems, it remains unclear how such an approach could be universalised in a global context:
If the legalisation of nature remains merely formal and external, and if the moralisation of nature remains merely subjective and internal, then we need another strategy that can combine both the formal and subjective, the external and internal approaches to the natural world. If the legalisation of nature cannot be easily internalised, and if the moralisation of nature cannot be easily universalised, then we need another option that can be both internalised and universalised. Is there a politics of nature that can do this?
Blumenfeld answers in the affirmative. He proposes a third approach he calls “the socialisation of nature, a political strategy that seeks to ground both the external and internal dimensions of transforming our relation to the natural world by democratising our relation to non-human nature, challenging the logic by which nature is appropriated as an object, value, or input into circuits of value.” This strategy stresses the practical applicability of such a framework, which has already gained ground on issues such as housing and healthcare but has its roots in the German Revolution of 1918 and its calls for the socialisation of the economy. The point is not to reduce socialisation to any one of the many proposals for how this was to be done—say, through state ownership and centralized planning or local councils and democratic planning—but to emphasize “how some of these first socialisation plans also represent early attempts at formulating an ecological economics: that is, thinking through a dynamic economy according to its physical components and constraints, instead of its marginal utility costs.”
Blumenfeld’s timely intervention represents just one of a number of urgently needed theoretical interventions into the politics of nature and exemplifies what Marxist approaches to the climate emergency can offer an environmental politics that seeks to look beyond the formal frameworks of legislation and the normative frameworks of moralism. We might also point to Alyssa Battistoni’s forthcoming book, Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature, which also insists that capital’s obstinate failure to value nature cannot be reduced to a moral question, nor can it be mitigated by legal measures, since it is internal to capital’s core dynamics. Without subscribing to the fatalist optimism that ecological crisis will bring about the collapse of capitalism, it is nevertheless clear that capitalist modernity is a dying civilization. It is equally clear that meaningfully addressing the climate crisis will require the end of capital accumulation and the creation of a world amenable to both human and nonhuman forms of life. In the age of climate breakdown, any Marxism worth its salt will be an environmental Marxism and will therefore need to engage with existing environmental movements. Likewise, environmentalism cannot content itself with critiques of consumerism or opposition to Big Oil. Much environmental thinking, including contemporary eco-Marxism, skirts the issue of abolishing capitalist relations of production and replacing them with a free association of producers. This project remains, as always, the task of committed communists worldwide.
Works Cited
Ajl, Max. A People’s Green New Deal. Pluto Books, 2021.
Blumenfeld, Jacob. “Socialising Nature.” The Break Down. November 28, 2024. https://www.break-down.org/post/socialising-nature
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Mariner Books, 2002.
Meadows, Donella H., Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III. The Limits to Growth: A Repost for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. Universe Books, 1972.
Copley, Jack. “Decarbonizing the Downturn: Addressing Climate Change in an Age of Stagnation.” Competition & Change 27, no. 3-4 (2023) 429-448.
“L'écologie est Foncièrement Anticapitaliste, Interview with André Gorz.” Le Nouvel Observateur. September 24, 2007. https://www.nouvelobs.com/essais/20070924.BIB0105/andre-gorz-l-ecologie-est-foncierement-anticapitaliste.html
Elson, Diane, ed. Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism. Verso, 2015.
Fioramonti, Lorenzo. Gross Domestic Problem: The Politics Behind the World's Most Powerful Number. Zed Books, 2013.
Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas. The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. Harvard University Press, 1971.
Hansen, Alvin. “Economic Progress and Declining Population Growth,” American Economic Review 29, no.1 (1939): 1-15.
Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
Hickel, Jason. Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. Penguin, 2021.
Huber, Matt. Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet. Verso, 2022.
Jackson, Tim. Post Growth: Life After Capitalism. Polity Press, 2021.
LeManager, Stephanie. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. Oxford University Press, 2014.
Leopolod, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. Oxford University Press, 1949.
Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Stream Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Verso, 2016.
Martínez-Alier, Joan. The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2002.
Marx, Karl. “Marx-Zasulich Correspondence.” Late Marx and the Russian Road. Ed. Teodor Shanin. Monthy Reivew Press, 1983. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/zasulich/index.htm
Montrie, Chad. A People’s Hisotry of Environmentalism in the United States. Continuum, 2011.
Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Verso, 2015.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2013.
Petrocultures Research Group, After Oil. Petrocultures, 2016.
Phillips, Leigh. Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry and Stuff. Zero Books, 2015.
Saito, Kohei. Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism. Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Schmelzer, Matthias, Andrea Vetter, and Aaron Vansintjan. The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism. Verso, 2022.
Schmidt, Alfred. The Concept of Nature in Marx. Verso, 2014.
Schumacher, E.F. Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. Hartley & Marks, 1999.
Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. Penguin Books, 1970.
Stoper, Kate. Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism. Verso, 2020.
Szeman, Imre, and Jeff Diamanti. ‘Nine Principles for a Critical Theory of Energy’. Polygraph 28 (2020): 137-159.
White, Richard. “‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’: Work and Nature. In Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. Ed. William Cronon. W.W. Norton & Company, 1995. 171-185.
Wrigley, Edward Anthony. Continuity, Chance and Change. Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Yaşın, Zehra Taşdemir. “The Adventure of Capital with Nature: From Metabolic Rift to the Value Theory of Nature.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 44, no. 2 (2017): 377-401.
