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Thursday, August 27, 2026

Matthew T. Huber - Climate Change as Class War

I write this review the day news reaches us of a horrific tragedy in Nepal. Hundreds if not thousands of people have been killed by a glacier collapse, flood and giant landslide. It seems likely that global warming played a role in these events, though at the moment of writing this is as yet unproven. Yet fossil fuel corporations do nothing to limit their emissions for fear of risking their profit. In his introduction to Climate Change as Class War Matthew T. Huber makes a pertinent point: "It is a great achievement of neoliberal ideology that policymakers today barely imagine the expropriation of fossil fuel property as a conceivable option despite the increasing severity of the crisis." Indeed politicians of the mainstream are doing much to expan production, condemning millions to death.

For socialists and environmentalists there is an inevitable follow up question. Why have our social movements, including mass and militant protests around environmental issues, failed to shift this situation? For socialists involved in environmental politics there's an additional question. How do we get workers involved? Huber writes:

One of my key arguments in this book is that if we want to build a majoritarian, popular movement around climate change, it must resonate with a broad and diverse working class. More importantly, the working class is alsosubject to lower, stagnating wages and alienating, dangerous work. This poverty and insecurity give the working class a material interest in better their lives through transformative change.

Too often though, Huber argues, socialists, including "eco socialists" have failed to engage with the workers movement, and argued for abstract politics that just attack capitalism and demand a socialist society. Later he adds, in critiquing Jason W. Moore with a critique that could be aimed at others on the left, that because "much of what is important ecologically is 'outside' value and production.... [this] reinforces the idea that class politics is separate from ecological politics - and a focus on production is separate from the external world of ecological 'conditions'."

The socialist tradition I am part of does not, I hope, fall into this trap. But we are very much a minority within the larger environmental movement and the politics that dominates that movement is shaped, Huber argues, by ideas and forces that cannot conceive of a challenge to the capitalist system and is "nowhere near achieving the revolution in the structuring logics of production". One key argument he makes is that this is because the climate movement is dominated by a "minority of the population", the "professional class". These professionals, "reproduce a capitalist ideology of meritocracy that tends to supplement the domination and exploitation of the majority of society (the working class)". Some of the fault, according to Huber, lies with "science communicators" who, he says are often scientists and believe the problem is "a lack of awareness" and who believe that "if the masses truly understood the science, action would follow." Such approaches lead to a technocratic solution to environmental issues and hence an attempt to work within the system.

More problematic, Huber says, is the way that that professional classes are shaped by their collective guilt over their own position in society and their own impact on the world. Let's look at how Huber argues this in regard to "carbon guilt".

At the heart of the flying less campaign is guilt over one's high carbon lifestyle... this guilt emerges from a contradiction at the heart of professional-class formation. One the one hand, the enture class project aims to use credentials to acive the salary and material security of a middle-class lifestyle. On the other hand professional-class lifestyles relate to massive levels of ecological degradation and waste. This realisation creates inward feelings of guilt or complicity... But carbon guilt leads one to think it is actually professional, middle-class consumers themselves who are most priviledged in a climate change world. Carbon guilt confuses material privilege - a level of comfort and security - with the power to control the material organisation of energy production.

Out of this guilt comes, Huber argues a series of strategies that see a minority of the population - in this case the professional class - arguing for a series of demands (eg degrowth) that are about asking the majority of the population (to consume less). Such austerity like policies can neither solve the climate crisis, as they don't challenge the fundamental driver of climate crisis - capitalist production; nor can they appeal to the workers who have already been told they must tighten their belts for decades.

There is much to agree with here. But I felt uneasy with the direct link between what Huber calls the professional class and carbon guilt. On the one hand, he cites two scientists James Hansen and Rachel Carson as sitting in the "lack of awareness camp". There are problems with these scientists approach to the system - Hansen for instance does advocate for the solutions that Huber critiques. But both of them were more radical that he credits. Hansen has taken part in direct action. Carson was a critic of capitalism and had she lived to see these decades would I think have gone much further.

On the other, I am less convinced about his argument around climate policy arising simply out of the class position of the professional class. One reason is practical - the types of workers he describes, scientists, university professors, medical doctors etc - have become increasingly proletarianised in the West. They have made up some of the biggest and more militant pickets in recent strikes in the UK. Another is where these politics come from. I think the bigger problem is the decline of revolutionary socialist politics and the way that Marxism in academia has become increasingly divorced from its revolutionary strategy. Environmental politics has been dominated by individualist approaches because of the influence of the fossil fuel industry (BP's carbon footprint) and NGOs. So while I do agree there's some truth to Huber's approach I found it inadequate.

However Huber adds a second qualification which I think is right. He points out that the working class feels limited in its ability to respond to the environment crisis, because of the nature of that crisis and because of the limitations of workers' power at the current time. Huber writes:

The working class not only lacks control over what it needs as individuals, but also over the larger sociaoecological "metabolism". This lack of control over material production itself is what leads to the specific experience of powerlessness over the ecological crisis today, of watching an unfolding disaster caused by seemingly distant and uncontrollable forces. Whether we see these as abstract "market" forces or the corporate elite, the lack of control over the processes of ecologica ldegradation creates feelings of helplessness in the face of planetary crisis.

This is absolutely right. The problem is not that workers are unaware or unconcerned about ecological questions - quite the contrary, they are often the most enthusastic about environmental issues - but workers feel powerless to change the status quo, or challenge the dominance of fossil fuel corporations. This is often acknowledged - "I'm recycling my paper, but whats the point if water companies just dump shit in the rivers". But the only solutions offered are individual, or corporate. This is also, it should be said, perpetuated by many trade union and labour movement "leaders" who, because of their ties to the system, form a class who have a vested interest in holding back struggle.

This refreshing and insightful material aside, I was disappointed by Huber's political conclusions. Here he tends to reject the idea of a revolutionary insurrection led by a revolutionary party. In "advanced capitalist societies, the working class faces a far more thoroughly armed state" and this (he quotes Eric Blanc), means "too much armed strength for an insurrectionary approach to be realistic". He instead hopes for a working class alternative, which by "sheer numbers, there is a possibility to stitch together a mass, working-class electoral colaition to win state power trhrough campaisn powered not only by masses of working-class votes but also by small donations that free up candidates from the more typical wealthy donors".

For those of us who recently lived through the Your Party debacle in the UK, I don't hold out much hope for this. Indeed, I'm concerned of the seeming dubordination of working class power through its ability to withdraw labour to electoral processes. This is not to say that workers cannot or should not, try to win elections and use parliament. But Marx did warn us that workers' cannot readily seize the capitalist state machinery and wield it for their interests. It needs to be smashed as its a weapon of the capitalist class itself.

Further Huber argues that we cannot rebuild workers' power quickly enough to give it the strength to challenge fossil fuel capitalism across the board. So he argues for a selective tactic based on workers in the energy industry. Again there is some interesting material here. But I'm more of the belief that its possible to develop workers' combativity much quicker, and that requires fighting for campaigns that link economic and politics issues. Two examples strike me - the Italian strikes over Palestine and the workers in London buses who are striking over AC and heat in their vehicles. Both demonstrate the potential for industrial action that links wider questions of imperialism and climate with economic struggles. Both also have the potential to link into much wider networks of solidarity.

Huber doesnt agree with the Climate Jobs strategy in the UK (disclosure, I am part of that campaign) because he suggests it (quoting Stegania Barca) sees "workers not as political subjects of an ecological revolution, but as potential victims of climate policies". I would turn this upsidedown and suggest that workers who are, or will be such victims, can be part of an ecological revolution through a process of struggle. In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest that properly articulated, a climate jobs strategy can lead to a wider generalisation of struggle. But that requires grassroots and rank and file radicals pushing for that outcome, rather than a passive top down approach.

Much of this review will seem like a major disagreement with the author. It is, of course, true that I do have disagreements. But they are tactical, rather than strategic. To illustrate this, I'd like to quote from Huber's conclusion:

We do not need better environmental policy ideas to solve climate change; we need a stronger working class. As long as we are losing the larger class struggle, we are also losing the climate struggle.

This is an absolutely correct conclusion. The key issue, as Huber repeatedly argues, is how to shift to a winning struggle. So while I have my own disagreements, I do encourage socialists to engage with Climate Change as Class War. Too few such books discuss workers at all, never mind their active struggles and the need for revolution. Matthew T. Huber's book does and this makes it worth the read.

Thursday, August 13, 2026

Emmanuel Terray - Marxism and "Primitive" Societies: Two Studies

Emmanuel Terray was a French political activist and Marxist anthropologist whose work was enormously important in the development of anthropological ideas. This short book is a collection of two seminal pieces, translated from French, wherein Terray grapples with the relevance of Marxism to anthropology. He does this by exploring the work of two other influential figures. The first of these is Lewis Henry Morgan whose work formed the foundation of anthropological science and deeply influenced Marx and Engels. Engels in fact used much of Morgan's book Ancient Society to inform his own work Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State.

Terray argues that while Morgan's work was incredibly important, Ancient Society (published in 1877) was much more controversial, because it "committed the mortal sin of evolutionism". After quoting some critics, including Claude Levi-Strauss, Terray sets himself the task of studying "Morgan's language to note not only waht is said in that language, but also what is said in spite of it". In doing so Terray makes a series of important contributions to Marxist anthropology as a science and a method. I should note here that I am not an expert in anthropology, or the works discussed. What matters to me is the process of exploration.

Terray writes that Morgan applied core ideas from Darwinism to human societies. Terray then writes:

It is temptng to close the investigation and conclude that Morgan's "genius" lies in having applied to human evolution the concepts Darwin developed to explain natural evolution.

But he cautions that Engels had this to say on Ancient Society:

Within the limits set by his subject, Morgan spontaneously discovered Marx's materialist conception of history, and his conclusions with regard to present-day society are absolutely communist postulates. The Roman and Greek gens is for the first time fully explained by those of savages, espeically the America Indians and this gives a solid base to primitive history.

But as Terray also points out, Marx and Engels were critical of any attempts to apply Darwinist evolutionary theory direct to human society. Marx wrote, in 1870, that "to see history up to the present as a class struggle is enough to demonstrate the superficial nature of an approach that seeks to make this history into an almost undifferentiated 'struggle or life'." Instead Terray argues that Morgan's success (and the support from Marx and Engels for his work) arises out of Morgan's attempt "to construct a theory of that history, that is, a syustem of concepts to make it possible to think it out scientifically".

In Terray's words, Morgan's theory of history is this: "human experience is produced by the interaction of three elements: man's primary needs, the primary germs of through, and natural logic". Crucial to this, and "the determinant sphere" for Morgan are the "arts of subsistence". Morgan says:

Mankind are the only beings who may be said to have gained an absolute control over the production of food, which at the outset they did not possess above other animals. Without enlarging the basis of susbsistence, mankind could not have propagated themselves into other areas...It is accordingly probable that the great epochs of human progress have been identified... with the enlragement of the sources of subsistence".

Marx and Engels would, of course, have a much more detailed exploration of how humans interact with nature, themselves and produce history. The development of the forces of production and the consequent transformation of social relations are central to their historical materialism. But it is Morgan's attempt to do this, and his recognition that ideas must connect to material reality to produce the necessities for survival, that would make his work so influential.

It's a surprisingly accessible work from Terray. But at times it seems to revel in obscurity. It is possible to work out why he means by "the transition from the punaluan family to the syndyasmian was not adequate to overturn the Turanian system of consanguinity". But it takes some work with a dictionary and a pencil.

Part two of the book is an engagement by Emmanuel Terray with the work of Claude Meillassoux, an anthropologist who trapplied historical materialism to a strudy of a "primative" society, in this case the Guro people of the Ivory Coast, a society in transition under the influence of colonialism. He begins by discussing the Marxist concept of "mode of production" and its relevance here as the Guro have a combination of different economic systems of production. Here I found Terray somewhat mechanical in his approach:

It should be possible to discover the dominant socioeconomic formations through the study of their instruments of labour and hence to construct a preliminary hypothesis as to the nature of the mode or modes of production concerned. It would then be possible to analyze the concrete social formations found in the field by the ethnologist and to begin to reconstruct the relations of production of which these structres are one "realisation".

I've always been a little wary of simply generalising from the instruments of labour to existing, contemporary, "social formations" and reading that backward into history. Drawing on Meillassoux's work, Terray argues that the Guro have a combination of "two modes of production". The two identified are a "tribal-village" system with "all the men of the group" acting as authority, and a lineage system whereby the "means of production are owned collectively but a single individual holds them on behalf of the group". These two areas differing in "where these modes of production" operate according to Terray. The former in "hunting with nets" the later in "agriculture, fishing, gathering" etc. The different requirements of the production producing different social relations etc. Terray continues to celebrate how Meillassoux shows the "interplay between kinship and relations and relations of production" vary and change. Here the detail of Terray's anthropology lost me, but he appears to be arguing that the socioeconomic formation of the Guro is shaped by the constant changing of genelogical kinship resting on an economic base:

Concerned to kepp the economic base as the determinant phase of the overall structure, [Meillassoux] gives a brilliant demonstation of the way in which the lineage system in the GUro socioeconomic formation derives from a transformation of genealogical kinship relations, a transformation determined and shaped by the requirements of production.

Why does this matter? Here we quote Terray again:

It appears that the absence of the exploitation of labor is the second necessary condition for kinship to act as an element in the relaisation of the mode of production. This brings us back by another route to the thesis supported by Morgan and Engels in the first applications of historical materialism to ethnolog: the domination of kinship relations in the social organisation is incompatible with the exploitation of labor and the existence of class relations.

Terray then returns to Marx to explore how the domination of one mode of production over another shapes the nature of society itself.

Terray's second article in this book is an attempt to explore core ideas of Marxism around modes of production and consider how successful the best proponent of the historical materialist approach has been. Terray concludes that Meillassoux has made important steps forward, which could ensure that "social anthropology becomes a particular section of historical metarialism devoted to socioeconomic formations" without capitalism. It is also clear that Terray's own engagement with this material opened up new vistas for future researchers, helping transform anthropology.

Marxism and "Primitive" societies is as the title suggests, in some ways very dated. For a none specialist it was, in places hard work. But it was also readable and engaging, and while I was lost in some of the closer arguments about "kinships" and "lineage", I gained a lot from seeing how Terray made his argument.

Sunday, August 02, 2026

Leon Trotsky - Fascism, Stalinism & the United Front

In the early 1930s, as fascism in Germany grew from strength to strength, the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote a series of pamphlets and articles to explain the nature of fascism and to argue for a working class strategy that could defeat it. These articles, several of the most important of which are collected here, remain some of the best studies of German fascism and Hitler's rise to power. They remain crucial reads today for those trying to understand contemporary fascism - not because the situation is identical, but because Trotsky's method is to place the far-right into the political and economic context.

That said, the essays collected here, contain a great deal of insight, strategy and tactics, that can help us understand how to defeat the far-right and fascism today. Key to this, as Trotsky understood in the 1930s, was mobilising the largest number of workers in militant and mass opposition to the fascists. This required the use of the United Front tactic, a strategy developed in the revolutionary circumstances of 1917 by the Bolsheviks, and adopted by the early Communist International. It required the revolutionary left to build a strategic alliance with forces and workers' organisations to the right of them in order to shape a mass movement. The potential, as Trotsky repeatedly notes, was there but the principle barrier to such unity was the ultra-left position of the German Communist Party (KPD). The KPD argued, following the lead of the now Stalinised Comintern, that the Social Democrats were no better than the fascists. Indeed, at times they made it clear they thought that the Social Democrats and the millions of German workers' who supported and voted for them were worse than the Nazis.

This positioning was tragic. It cut the revolutionary left off from wider workers' forces. This fundamentally weakened the anti-fascist movement and it also undermined the ability of the KPD to build the revolutionary left. Throughout these essays there is a growing sense of urgency from Trotsky as he desperately argues for a different course.

In 1930 he writes:

If the Communist Party is the party of revolutionary hope, then fascism, as a mass movement, is the party of counter-revolutionary despair. When revolutionary hope embraces the whole proletarian mass, it inevitably pulls behind it on the road of revolution considerable and growing sections of the petty bourgeoisie.

But the opposite is also true. Trotsky continues:

The election revealed... counter-revolutionary despair embraced the petty bourgeois mass with such a force that it drew behind it many sections of the proletariat.

Later he points out that:

those workers who remain with Social Democracy, as well as those who voted this time for the National Socialists, did do not out of simple ignorance, not because they awakened only yesterday, not because they have as yet had no chance to know what the Communist Party is, but because they have no faith, on the basis of their own experience in the recent years.

The mistakes of the KPD in the revolutionary era of the early 1920s were one thing, but a bigger problem was the wrong-headed approach to the Social Democrats. One problem of course, was the failure to build unity also undermined the ability of the KPD to build the sort of struggles that could have undermined some of the political and economic base of the Nazi's support.

The belief that the SPD were as bad as the fascists meant that the KPD wasn't able to launch the sort of industrial strategy that could have raised the confidence of the working class and transformed the situation. In his 1932 article, The Only Road, Trotsky points out that it is precisely the chaos of capitalism itself that is leading the capitalists towards seeing fascism as a solution. That requires a clearer revolutionary strategy from the KPD, one that was sorely lacking:

If the economic evils of our epoch, in the last analysis, result from the fact that the productive forces of humanity are incompatible with private ownership of the means of production as well as with national boundaries, German capitalism is goring through the severest convulsions just because it is the most modern, most advanced, and most dynamic capitalism on the continent of Europe.

He continues a few pages later:

The petty bourgeoisie must acquire faith in the ability of the proletariat to lead society onto a new road. The proletariat can inspire this faith only by its strength, by the firmness of its actions, by a skilful offensive against the enemy, by the success of its revolutionary policy.

The barrier to this was, in the first instance, the fact that the Soviet Union's isolation meant that country was no longer led by revolutionaries, but by a "national-opportunistic bureaucracy, which does not believe in world revolution". This is the "misfortune" for the whole proletariat.

Many of these essays are available elsewhere, and some of them have been collected in different collections. One thing that stands out from this edition from Bookmarks in Britain is a very useful framing essay by Steve Wright, and contextual introductions to each year by Chris Harman. This new edition of Fascism, Stalinism and the United Front also benefits from an excellent essay by British socialist and anti-fascist organiser Samira Ali, who brings Trotsky's analysis of fascism up to date. As she says, these articles "endure because of their theoretical clarity and their strategic questions remain profoundly contemporary".

In Britain we live in the most dangerous times since Trotsky was writing. If the specifics of fascist organisations today are different, as Samira Ali says, we "return to Trotsky['s writings]... not because they offer a ready-made template for understanding fascism today, but because they provide something more important than historical analogy. They provide a method: analyse fascism concretely, identify the forces that can stop it, and argue for forms of working class unity before the decisive moment has passed."

As such this book is one for our dangerous times.

Monday, July 27, 2026

Tomáš Tengely-Evans - Death Rides Out: Imperialism in the 21st Century

As Socialist Worker editor Tomáš Tengely-Evans has had to cover more than their share of imperialist conflict and the threat of such conflict. In the last few years we've seen war in the Middle East, genocide in Palestine, a bloody proxy-war between Nato and Russia over Ukraine and Trump's aggression against countries as varied as Greenland, Canada and Venezula.

Understanding the tendency for nations to go to war under capitalism, and the particular forms these wars take, has been one of the great tasks of Marxism. Tengely-Evans' new book is a brilliant synthesis of this historical work with insightful studies of current conflicts and their source. The book begins with Tengely-Evans's comment that he wrote the first draft of the book in Sarajevo, close to were Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated - one of the events in the run up to World War One. It's a fitting beginning, because he begins with how Marxists like Lenin, Luxembourg and Bukharin developed and updated Marx and Engels' war to explain the origins of the slaughter. The war did not arise out of the killing of Ferdinand, but what was it about society at the time that meant that within a few weeks of the assassination millions of men were being murdered?

For Marxists it is the economic division of the globe that leads to conflict. More precisely it is the uneven division of the globe between capitalist interests. As Tengely-Evans writes:

Because capitalism does not develop equally acorss the world, there is a constant fluctuation of the relative power of the different nation-states within the global imperialist system, and this drives a logic of imperialist competition that tends to build towards war.

In hindsight these insights don't feel particularly novel. But Tengely-Evans makes the point that some Marxists thought in the run up to World War One that global capitalism made war impossible. Tragically they were proved wrong, and it was left to a few individuals like Lenin to critique this. One brilliant aspect of this new book though is that it neatly summarises how Lenin, Bukharin and Luxembourg developed a new understanding of the particular capitalist moment. In particular the question of "finance capital" playing a role in pushing and organising production. But Tengely-Evans does point out the limits of this approach, which saw both Lenin and Bukharin generalising too much from the nature of German capitalism - leading Tengely-Evans to point out that "the core of Lenin's theory stands the test of time if creatively applied".

The "core" refers to the way, in Bukharin's words, "the struggle between state capitalist trusts is decided in the first place by the relation between their military forces, for the miliatry power of the country is the last resort of the struggling 'national groups' of capitalists." Tengely-Evans uses this approach in his very stimulating analysis of current conflicts. For instance, writing about East Asia, he says:

East Asia is now the most dnamic region of global capitalism - and consequently, a key battleground of imperialist comptetition ebtween the US, China and regional powers. It makes up around 40 percent of global domestic product and over 50 percent of global economic growth. China, Japan and India are the leading economies in the region making up 65 percent of the continent's GDP.

It is this startling growth that terrifies Washington. Tengely-Evans goes on to show how the US state has been preoccupied particularly by China, but more importantly for understanding the world today, he shows how conflicts in Venezula and the Middle East, are often shaped by the US government acting in response to the threat from China. As he says:

The US may want to focus on the Western Hemisphere. But it does so within a global system of increasing competition and while trying to contain China across muiltiple parts of the world. War with Iran hasn't turned out the way the US planned. But it's a product of that increasing competition, unleashed on the world in large part by China's rise, and that logic of competition drives war between the competing parts of the system.

Does the left really need another book in Imperialism? Especially when those of authors' like Lenin have proved so useful. I would argue that one great strength of Tengely-Evans' book is that it offers an understanding of imperial through a Marxist lens, while demonstrating how Marxism is a tool to understand the world. This constantly needs to be refreshed and new generations of activists taught how the system works, not least because there will be more and more war. Indeed Tengely-Evans quotes Marx: "The working classes have the duty to master themselves the mysteries of international politics". Unpicking why Russia is in Ukraine, or how Israel makes it hard for Trump to stop war on Iran needs an wider understanding of the system itself.

In addition Tengely-Evans shows how an Marxist understanding of war and imperialism leads to a revolutionary approach to stopping war. The final section, on how revolutionaries have tried to turn war into revolution is a lesson for everyone today - if we are to avoid imperialist escalation leading us all to our doom.

Related Reviews

Bukharin - Imperialism and World Economy
Lenin - Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism
Callinicos - Imperialism and Global Political Economy

Tuesday, July 07, 2026

Nikolai Bukharin - Imperialism and World Economy

Three great works of Marxism mark the transition from Marx and Engels' work on economics into the modern era. They are Lenin's Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Nikolai Bukharin's Imperialism and World Economy and Rosa Luxemburg's Accumulation of Capital. Each of them was written to attempt to engage with a changing world - one where Great Powers had divided up the world and were clashing with each other for redivision of the spoils.

Most revolutionary socialists have read Lenin's contribution to this. Fewer have read Bukharin's and Luxemburg's. Bukharin's work is a more detailed work that has many overlaps with Lenin's book but develops the points further. It also has an interesting history. Because it was lost to the censor and only recovered after the revolution it is published with an additional chapter that reflects the post-revolutionary hope of the era. Bukharin, as with Lenin, elegantly paints a picture of a transformed world where everything is in flux:

In various ways there thus takes place the trasnfusion of capital from one "national" sphere into the other; there grows the intertwining of "national capitals"; there proceeds the "internationalisation" of capitalism. Capital flows into foreign factories and mines, plantations and railroads, steamship lines and banks; it grows in volume; it sends part of the surplus value "home" where it may begin an independent movement; it accumulates the other part; it wides over and over again the spehere of its application; it creates an ever thickening network of international interdependence.

He continues:

We thus see that the growth of the world economic process having as its basis the growth of productive forces, not only calls forth an intensification of production relations among various countries, not only widens and deepens general capitalist interrelations, but also calls to life new economic formations ,new economiv forms unknown to the past epochs in the history of capitalist development.

These new formations, syndicates and cartels and other such capitalist constructs, signal the emergence of a new order. Bukharin argues that the old world economy could be compared to the structure of a national economy until the late 19th century, but the new economy is marked by the "considerable narrowing [of] the hitherto unhampered 'free play of economic forces'." National economies are now geared towards the international economy, but the global economy is much more than a sum of national economies it is a everchanging, interacting and evolving system. Even if competition was abolished, he argues, in a national economy, there would still be crises because of the international economy.

This, Bukharin argues, is also true of war. War "in capitalist society" is an example of competition, extended to the world economy. "War is an immanent law of a society producing goods under the pressure of the blind laws of a spontaneously developing world market". But, he argues, not one of a sociaet that consciously regulates the process of production and distribution - i.e. socialism.

For Bukharin it is the newness of 20th century capitalism that is remarkable. He describes the changes as "radical" and it is driven by finance capital which has reached "colossal proportions". Banking capital "appears in the role of an organiser of industry". But it is unplanned and disorganised. The growth of the productive forces "clashes with the antagonistic form of distribution and with the disproportion between various parts of capitalist production". It is a profoundly unstable world, without planning or equilibnrium, "hence terrific crises and precipitous changes".

For those reading Imperialism and World Economy in the era of Trump it is worth noting Bukharin's comments on tariffs. These are "partial sorties". In the long run he says, "conflict is solved by the interrelation of... force of arms".

Some of the book takes up political questions. Bukharin points out that pacifists cannot solve war - because of its centrality to the logic of capital. Less convincing his Bukharin's insistance, along with Lenin, that there is an aristocracy of labour in the rich countries that is bought off by the surplus from imperialism. Not least because there is no satisfactory explanation of how this process happens, and the capitalists have never knowingly handed over cash to their workers - however important they are - without serious class struggle.

Also Bukharin fails to foresee what might happen when capitalism has further developed in colonial countries. How could new imperialisms, or sub imperialisms, evolve and challenge the powerful nations. This is a process I would argue that plays a central role in modern political economy. The emergence of China as a new imperialist power is one example. But so are the regional imperialist interests of countries like Israel and Iran. Their interplay with global politics is shaping the modern world.

Overall though, this is a must read for a deeper grasp of the history and development of world capitalism and of Marxist thought on imperialism. Tragically a book written for the early 20th century that is still massively relevant to today.

Sunday, May 24, 2026

V.I. Lenin - Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism

Lenin's short book on Imperialism is perhaps the best known of his extensive writings. So well known, in fact, that the edition I've just read is number 96 of the Penguin "Great Ideas" series. Make of that what you will. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism remains a key reference point because of the continuation of imperialism itself. It is a succinct presentation and defence of the Marxist understanding of Imperialism, defended by Lenin principly (and deliberately) through reference to bourgeois commentators and statistical sources and defended by Lenin from critiques on the left, most prominently Karl Kautsky.

The book is itself limited, or rather it is very much of its time. Lenin acknowledged this because he was writing for the censor. Written in 1916 it needed to bypass Tsarist censorship and thus Lenin's conclusions and language are deliberately mitigated. Michael Kidron, his his own discussion of Lenin's work noted more critically that "have all been lost sight of in an uncritical, almost universal, acceptance of its central themes. This is all the more strange since much of what he analysed has clearly either gone or become much less important than in his day."

Kidron goes on to make some sharp criticisms of Lenin's work. Recognising it as a brilliant piece of revolutionary work at the time, but acknowleding that it has its limits and is very much of its time. Lenin himself acknowledges this in one of the prefaces written after the Revolution when he notes that the book was limited by lack of research material while writing in exile. Kidron's criticisms focus on the changing role of banks and finance capital, which was central to Lenin's analysis and he argues, a over generalisation from the German economic situation. The changing importance of capital export from developed economies to the developing world is also something noted by Kidron.

These criticisms remain important and Marxist theorists such as Alex Callinicos have continued to develop the theory of imperialism for a new years, 60 years after Kidron's critique and over a century since Lenin's. Nonetheless Lenin's book remains crucial to understanding modern imperialism because it offers a Marxist account of the interaction between capitalist development and imperialist structure. Lenin argues that his left critics, such as Kautsky continually misunderstand imperialism prescisely because of their neglect for context.

So what does Lenin argue? Imperialism, says Lenin, arises out of a stage in capitalist development when monopoly capitalism (existence of gigantic firms that have swallowed up most, or all, of their competitors) comes to dominant and can obtain massive profits from exporting capital into delveloping countries. This is faciliated, Lenin argues, when banks have reached such proportions that they control finance capital and can deploy it to further their own interests and those of other capitalists. This then goes further, as Lenin writes, "the 'personal union' between the banks and industry is completed by the 'personal union' between both and the state."

This union between capital and the state means that the state itself can and must intervene in the interest of its own national capital in the world. While this can lead to war, Lenin also highlights that imperialism is more than war. It is the intervention of the state in trade, economic relations and colonial development, in the interests of its capital. Two countries, he writes

England and France are the oldest capitalist countries, and... possess the most colonies; the other two, the United States and Germany, are the front rank as regards rapidty of development the degree of extension of capitalist monopolies in industry. Together these four countries own 479,000,000,00 francs... nearly 80 percent of the world's financial capital. Thus... the whole world is more or less the debtor to and tributary of these four international banker countries, the four 'pillars' of world finance capital.

Such a relationship rests on the ability of the state to deploy military power if required, as Thomas Friedman famously said in 1999:

The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

It is this analysis that makes Lenin's work such a crucial starting point for anyone trying to analyse the modern world. Think of US intervention in the Middle East, or Russia and Ukraine's war. We cannot understand these without understanding the "economic essence of imperialism", to use Lenin's words. Take Ukrain and Russia. Russian aggression began the conflict, but it was Nato and Western interests attempt to hold back Russia's economic interests that identify the conflict as a proxy imperialist one.

But there are aspects to contemporary imperialism that remain absent from Lenin's book. One of these is the question of "sub imperialism", those nations who have broken from colonial domination and now exert their own economic and political interests, sometimes militarily. Israel in the wider Middle East, or Iran and UAE in Syria and Sudan. Lenin's work is dominated by an attempt to explain World War One and link this understanding to a fight against "opportunists" whose siding with their nation state had so badly damaged the socialist movement. Nonetheless, understanding how the development of capital in post-colonial countries and regions has led to sub-imperialist clashes, hinges on the same recognition as Lenin developed in understanding the rise of the Great Powers in the colonial era. If Lenin's work doesn't anticipate these developments, it does, at every stage recognise that colonialism needed to be resisted by those workers and peasants in colonial states. Had he lived to see this era, he would no doubt have analysed it as succinctly and clearly as he does in this work.

Related Reviews

Lenin - The Development of Capitalism in Russia
Lenin - The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution 1905-1907
Lenin - Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky
Lenin - Will the Bolsheviks Maintain Power?
Callinicos - Imperialism and Global Political Economy

Tuesday, May 19, 2026

V.I. Lenin - The Development of Capitalism in Russia

First published in 1899 with a new edition in 1908, Lenin's The Development of Capitalism in Russia is a systematic exploration of the Russian economy at the start of the century. It is based on an extremely detailed reading of official studies and statistics for the Russian economy, something that can prove daunting to the reader as Lenin repeatedly cites figures for machinery, land, farms, workers and almost every aspect of the economy. Lenin is challenging those, particularly the Russian radical Narodniks, who were arguing that Russia was not capitalist, or could not be capitalist. Instead Lenin deploys arsenals of statistics to prove quite the opposite. Russia was seeing the rapid development of capitalism in every part of the economy and those parts of the economy that were organised in older ways, were being squeezed by new markets, trade with the cities and production for profit.

One of the things that Lenin is keen to argue for, is the progressive nature of capitalist relations over those that preceed this. This theme runs through the book. For instance, in discussing the migration of labour around Russia aslabrouers seek work and better wages he writes:

Like the diversion of the population from agriculture to the towns, non-agricultural migration is a progressive phenomenon. It tears the population out of the neglected backward, history-forgotten remote spots and draws them into the whirlpool of modern social life. It increases literacy among the population, heightens their understanding, and gives them civilised habits and requirements.

Lenin cites studies and statistics to back up these claims. His argument is not just, however, that capitalist relations improve the lives and conditions (and outlook) of the producers, but also that the capitalist mode of production is an advance on the old feudal order, improving output, quality and developing the means of production rapidly. He thus rails against those, such as the Narodniks, who argue that capitalism is not a development, but rather a worsening of the situation for ordinary producers. They celebrate the older social relations, the small production units, the family farms and manufacturers, failing to recognise the historic significance of the emergence of capitalism out of feudalism. Lenin writes:

[The Narodnik economists] deny the progressive nature of capitalism in Russia, pointing to the fact that in agriculture our entrepreneurs readily resort to labour-service and in industry to the distribution of home work and that in mining they seek to secure the tying down of the worker, legislative prohibition of competition by small establishments, etc., etc. The illogicality of such arguments and their flagrant distortion of historical perspective are glaring. Whence, indeed, does it follow that the efforts of our entrepreneurs to utilise the advantages of pre-capitalist methods of production should be charged to our capitalism, and not to those survivals of the past which retard the development of capitalism and which in many cases are preserved by force of law?

He continues:

Should we not... be surprised at the fact that, under the circumstances, there are people who are capable of idealising the pre-capitalist economic order in Russia, and who shut their eyes to the most urgent and pressing necessity of abolishing all obsolete institutions that hinder the development of capitalism.

This is not to say that Lenin ignores the way that capitalism exploits working people. While arguing that "the drawing of women and juveniles into production is, at bottom, progressive" he continues that "the capitalist factory places these categories of the working population in particularly hard conditions" and argues for legislation that will reduce hours of work, improve conditions and so on. But he is very clear that it would be wrong to argue for the banning of women and young people from working in factories. The reason is, he argues, that the entry of these sections of the population into industry is smashing apart the old patriarchal order:

By destroying the old patriarchal isolation of these categories of the population who formerly never emerged from the narrow circle of domestic, family relationships, by drawing them into direct participation in social produciton, large-scale machine industry stimulates their development and increases their independence, in other words, creates conditions of life that are incomparably superior to the patriarch immobility of pre-capitalist relations.

It is remarkable to see how Lenin understands these dynamics, celebrating the shattering of old social relations and the emergence of new relations as capitalism develops new towns, new technology and draws millions into new forms of production.

Lenin tracks the way this takes place, first noting how emerging capitalist relations in the countryside have created stratas among the peasantry, the richer ones taking more land and beginning to employ other peasants as workers, then expanding their interests into other forms of production. He writes:

The separation of industry from agriculture takes place in connection with the differentiation of the peasantry, and does so by different paths at the two poles of the countryside: the wrll-to-do minority open industrial establishments, enlarge them improve their farming methods, hire farm labourers to till the land, devote and increasing part of the year to industry and... find it more convenient to separate their industrial from their agricultural undertakings.

Lenin emphasises the importance of the parallel processes of the "depeasantising" of the peasantry as labowners move from "labour-service" to wage labour, together with the transition of agriculture "into commodity production". This was the start, but it is inseparable from the development of capitalist industrial production. The parallels with the development of capitalism in England as analysed by Marx, are clear for all to see.

Lenin also follows Marx by noting that in addition to capitalism's exploitation of workers, it also impacts other relations. Here, for instance, Lenin discusses how the relationship between agriculture and industry could be mutually beneficial:

The growth of agricultural technical trades is extremely important as regards the development of capitalism. Firstly, this growth represents one of the forms of the development of commercial farming, and is, moreover, the form that shows most vividly the conversion of agriculture into a branch of industry of capitalist society. Secondly, the development of the technical processing of agricultural produce is usually connected intimately with technical progress in agriculture: on the one hand, the very production of the raw material for processing often necessitates agricultural improvement (the planting of root-crops, for example); on the other hand, the waste products of the processing are frequently utilised in agriculture, thus increasing its effectiveness and restoring, at least in some measure, the equilibrium, the interdependence, between agriculture and industry, the disturbance of which constitutes one of the most profound contradictions of capitalism.

Marx's writing on the "metabolic rift" between human society and nature, emerged from his critique of capitalist agriculture, and here Lenin shows his awareness of this, through a recognition that a rational use of the by-products of food processing could be used to offset one of capitalism's most profound contradictions.

In mentioning Marx, we should finish of this review by noting that Lenin's work (like Marx's Capital) has little to say about socialism. This is because Lenin, again like Marx, is engaged in a project of understanding capitalism in order to progress the radical and revolutionary movement against it. The Development of Capitalism in Russia is in effect a polemic against those who fail to grasp either the development of capitalism itself in that country or its historical significance.

Lenin's sharp awareness of the development and growth of the working class in rural and urban areas is a recognition in the emergence of a force in Russia that could challenge both capitalism and the remnants of the old order. A few years after the completion of the first edition of this book, that working class would explode onto Russia's historical stage in the revolution of 1905, the dress rehearsal for the revolution of 1917. Lenin would further develop these ideas in his articles on the agrarian programme for the left.

Few today read The Development of Capitalism in Russia. This is a shame. It is a book that has perhaps been unduly neglected for Marxists studying the development of capitalism. Much of the material here has clear parallels with the emergence of capitalism in Europe. The book is, in places, a difficult read - mostly because Lenin backs up every single argument with multiple statistics and figures. Some of the editions of this work have some beautiful pull outs of tables, and facsimilies of Lenin's original drafts. The figures however should not deter the reader. There's much of interest here.

Thursday, April 23, 2026

Ian Angus - Metabolic Rifts: Capitalism's Assault on the Earth

Karl Marx eagerly devoured writings on all aspects of history, culture and science. Anyone who has read a small part of his work will be struck by references to contemporary politics, history, science, art and culture. But in 1851 Marx read a paper that altered how he thought about the world. This was by Roland Daniels, a fellow Communist activist, doctor and scientist which described something called "organic metabolism", the "simultaneous destruction and regeneration" of living organisms. Daniels thought that this could be used to understand human society and Marx, agreeing, placed metabolic ideas at the heart of his ongoing analysis of humans and society.

The concept of "metabolism" for Marx, and Marxists, has been the subject of intense discussion in recent years. A quarter of a century ago John Bellamy Foster wrote a fundamental text Marx's Ecology which drew out the ecological core of Marx's though and popularised the concept of "metabolic rift". In the years since, metabolic rift theory has become a tool eagerly used by revolutionaries to understand the relationship between capitalism and nature and how to change it. But it has also been critiqued by some on the Marxist left and by more people on the right.

Ian Angus has been a prominent figure in these discussions through his online journal Climate and Capitalism and this, his latest book, is a study of "Metabolic Rift" and a reassertion of key concepts. But Angus goes much further than restating the arguments. He notes that

Marx could not have known how broad, deep, high and complex the metabolism was. Scientists in his time were just beginning to study the metabolic processes that make life possible at every level, from cells to the entire planet, and even today vast parts are not well understood. But he grasped the essence of the matter, and his insights provide a basic framework for understanding what is happening to the Earth System at all levels today.

So Angus' book sets itself the task of firstly explaining the "metabolic" framework and then using it to explain what is happening to the Earth System today. It is a huge task, and while Angus doesn't claim to write a full analysis of what is going wrong, he offers both a general approach and specific examples that explain the interlocked environmental crises we are facing.

In writing this book Angus stands in a long, if neglected or forgotten, tradition of key Marxist figures engaging with science to understand history and the world. Marx's metabolic approach was mostly forgotten after his death, but not by all. In a key chapter he looks at the work of three Marxists - Bebel, Kautsky and Bukharin - to demonstrate how they each, in different ways approached social and scientific questions in a similar way to Marx. I am particularly glad that Angus devotes some time to Kautsky's work The Agrarian Question, which was described by Lenin as "the most important even in present day economic literature". It is a book that ought to be more widely read for those trying to understand precisely while capitalist agriculture is so destructive.

But I was taken by Angus' account of an earlier work by August Bebel. Bebel's 1879 book Woman and Socialism was one of the most widely read popular expositions of socialist ideas. It was also a book that explored ecological issues. Bebel wrote that capitalist agriculture is "soil vandalism" and it "cripples the land and decreases the crops". He also bemoaned environmental destruction including "the senseless ravaging of forests, for the sake of profit".

Angus explains that the books like these "disproves the canard that socialists of the late 1800s and early 1900s did not know or care about the universal metaolism of nature or the environmental destruction caused by rifts in that metabolism". That said he acknowledges that there was a loss of this knowledge and it is being rediscovered. But this "does not mean that everyone understands the funamental concepts". Crucially, "a common misunderstanding in articles on metabolic rift... is treating it as a metaphor rather than as a description of real global circumstances".

The bulk of the book then is an attempt to explain these core concepts. Angus does this by firstly explaining the metabolic processes that are key to the Earth's systems. Some of these are ancient. Angus' explores how life evolved and how it required chemicals that arose out of key cyclical processes that are built into the planet's geological systems and climate.

Perhaps the most impressive chapters however are those that show how the Earth's metabolic processes are being broken by capitalism. Two of these chapters are essential reading - on the breaking of the carbon cycle (which is driving climate change) and the disruption of the nitrogen cycle. The latter a rarely mentioned crisis that is causing serious problems. Industrial agriculture is pumping nitrogen into Earth's systems faster than any natural process can break it down. The "glut" is breaking a cycle that has exised for "hundreds of millions of years" which saw:

Constant recycling of reactive nitrogen in multiple forms, "a metabolism prescibed by the natural laws of life itself," enabled plant and animal life to thrive almost everywhere on the planet.

But:

Planetary boundaries research confirms that the current level of industrial nitrogen "cannot continue without significantly eroding the resilience of major components of Earth-System functioning".

To fix this, Angus concludes, requires taking control of the valves and "expropriating" the factories. He says:

However it is achieved, social control of nitrogen production must ensure a radical reduction of nitrogen use. That will require balancing the need to prevent ecological damage aganst the need to produce sufficient food, not just withing a country, but globally. It may one day be possible to feed the world without synthetic fertiliser and other chemicals, but undoing the damage that capitalism has caused won't be easy or quick.

The Nitrogen cycle chapter demonstrates very well the great strength of Angus' book, which is the way that Marxism must engage with science to develop strategies that can offer solutions to environmental crises. This is explicitly explored in the final chapters when Angus shows how scientists often come close to recognising that the environmental crises we face are systemic ones, but seldom draw revolutionary conclusions. He warns, however, that what science shows is that the changes needed are urgent, but will also take "decades". Day two of the "revolution" will not see ecological equilibrium restored. But it will open up a space where workers, scientists and activists can find a way forward - at the same time as having access to the wealth and power they need to deal with immediate issues. This, as Angus says, is not about "reordering capitalism" but building a new society in tune with the natural world. Nonetheless the first revolutionary stage is necessary, and I was struck by a pertinent quote that Angus uses from the great ecological socialist William Morris that I had not read before. Morris said:

The first real victory of the Social Revolution will be the establishment not indeed of a complete system of communism in a day, which is absurd, but of a revolutionary adminstration whose definite and conscious aim will be to prepare and further, in all available ways, human life for such a system.

Looking at the world around us the catastrophe threatens on multiple fronts: imperialist war, genocide, economic stagflation and environmental disaster. In Metabolic Rifts Ian Angus reminds us that there is a deep tradition of revolutionary politics closely engaged with scientific research, that offers an understanding of the chaos around us. It also offers us a strategy to change it. I urge readers to read it.

Monday, February 16, 2026

Alyssa Battistoni - Free Gifts: Capitalism and the politics of nature

In 1875 Karl Marx wrote a devastating critique of the programme of the United Workers’ Party of Germany. In its opening paragraph he dismissed their summary that “labour is the source of all wealth and culture” commentating instead:

Labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labour, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labour power.

This was such a basic tenet of revolutionary ideas that Marx claimed that it was written in “in all children's primers”. We can forgive Marx’s hyperbole here, but his central point is a crucial starting point for understanding how capitalism functions today, and how capitalists themselves behave.

Nature, as a source of value, has long been understood as a “free gift” to the capitalist production process. Alyssa Battistoni’s book is a detailed study of the phenomena of “free gifts” and how they are used. She begins from the classical political economists such as Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Say who saw nature’s free gift in almost every part of the economy, developing the concept in part from the view that nature was a “gift from God”. She says however that “free gift” is an “odd” term. Gifts are, by definition, given freely with no expectation of reward. Indeed it is telling that the word processor I am writing these sentences is telling me to drop the word “free” as superfluous. The addition of the word “free” by the classical economists is, Battistoni says, telling, because “it provides a clue that the free gift is not timeless or universal, but rather a category defined in relation to the market”.

Marx had a different starting point. Nature’s “free” gift is a gift only to capital. Once the means of production are held in private hands then the only beneficiaries of nature’s gifts are the capitalists. Consider a river whose flow can drive a water wheel, the private ownership of the banks of the river, or the right to access the waterway, mean that the endless power of the river is accessible only to the capitalist who has bought access to it. Battistoni concludes:

The problem with capitalism… is not just that it destroys nature or unjustly distributes the material harms and benefits of production. Rather, these problems stem from another, second—order problem: that capitalism limits our ability to treat nonhuman nature as something other than a free gift. It constrains our ability, individually and collectively, to make genuine decisions about how to value and relate to the nonhuman world, and to take responsibility for those decisions. Put simply: capitalism limits our freedom.

While this might not seem to great an insight, and Battistoni doesn’t claim any originality, it’s importance lies in the fact that it locates the concept of the “free gift” central to the structure of capitalist production itself, rather than as a superficial outgrowing of particular functions of the system. There are plenty of writings that critique one aspect of neoliberal environmental policy of the other – the absurdity of assigning prices to particular aspects of non-human nature, or the creation of markets and trading in carbon and other forms of pollution. What is less common is the understanding that the possibility for these neoliberal expressions of capitalism arise out of the structure of capitalism itself.

One further point on this theme by Battistoni is insightful. Discussing the famous comment by Marx that what distinguishes an architect from a bee is that an architect “raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality”. A more rewarding insight she says, comes from Harry Braverman, who notes that the significance of human consciousness is not just that humans can make the reality from their imagination, it is that they can communicate this to others making possible “capitalism’s particular organisation of production”. In turn, she notes, this “makes possible the separation of control over the means of production from the producers”.

Thus while human labour is very much, as Marx noted, a “manifestation of a force of nature”, it is different to the other gifts of nature. When purchasing labour power, the capitalists are able to deploy it in a myriad of different ways. A river, on the other hand, flows with gravity. Class rule is the ability of the capitalists to direct human labour in order to utilise nature in order to accumulate wealth. The capitalists are not however entirely free to make their own decisions. As Marx memorably pointed out, the capitalists are “compelled” to behave in a particular way by the competition at the heart of capitalism. “The market”, Battistoni points out, “is capitalism’s government body, the institution that structure action on a daily basis”. It is this that makes capitalism so destructive to humanity and nature. Because it means that the capitalists cannot escape the logic of production – a logic that places profit before everything else.

Nature, however, can form a barrier to capitalist accumulation. There are obvious physical limitations – for instance it might not be profitable to mine a particular resource. But there is a secondary form for this. Some aspects of production are not profitable enough. For instance Battistoni notes that the persistence of peasant and small scale production, despite expectations to the contrary, is a result of capitalism’s inability to make enough profits from day to day agriculture. It is more profitable to invest upstream and downstream from farming through producing fertilisers, or distributing foodstuffs than to take over all aspects of production.

This is, she notes, a point of critique of those such as the radical Republican movement in the 19th century, or anarchists today, who argue that production like this represents a bastion against capitalism. In reality, it not “the absence of capitalism” but “the result of a particular set of strategies adopted by capital in the face of intransigent natural obstacles to the total subordination of production”. She makes a similar point about fishing, which she says is one of the last remaining areas of “formally subsumed production” as opposed to areas of the economy which have experienced “real production”. While there is no doubt that small fishing fleets and individually owned boats do persist. I am unsure its quite as stark as Battistoni suggests – the domination of massive trawlers and big corporations in the marine economy cannot be ignored.

Two other aspects of Battistoni’s discussion of “free gifts” are worth noting. One of these arises out of her discussion of pollution. The production of waste products and the dumping of them in the wider environment is a central part of capitalist production. Pollution in this sense, is “matter out of place” that has no use or exchange value. The inability of capitalism to monetarise this is what makes it pollution. Again Battistoni argues, it’s not enough to critique the individual factory or capitalist for this pollution. We have to see pollution as arising from the structure of the system itself. But one further “free gift” exists in this context. The ability of the human body to tolerate pollution or absorb it. Our ability to survive in polluted factories, or live in areas polluted by industry or cope with certain levels of poison in our water, is a gift to the capitalist. Pollution in this sense is another aspect of our lack from freedom within capitalism.

The labour that is central to the reproduction of labour – the bringing up of children and the feeding, clothing, providing for the family is another “free gift” to the system. Here Battistoni rejects the idea that “reproductive labour is devalued “because it has been ideologically ‘naturalised’.” Similarly, it is not enough to say, like Jason W Moore, that capitalism “defines nature as ‘cheap’ in order to better appropriate it”. Instead

Attending to the interaction of bodily and labour processes, and to their organisation within capitalist societies, is vital for understanding how and why certain kinds of human labour are perpetually devalued.

She continues:

The relationship between human reproductive labour and the ‘free gifts of nature’, then is not merely analogical or isomorphic, but continuous: both reflect a similar collision of recalcitrant biophysical processes with capitalist social forms and relations. Instead of treating reproductive labour as an inherently distinctive type of activity of sphere of life, one always-already informed by gender, I understand it as a formal category naming a diverse array of concreate activities unified by their structural position as a remnant of capitalist abstraction.

For Battistoni nature’s gifts to humanity can only be understood in the context of the dominant economic system. The free gift concept is the “default form” in which nature appears to the capitalist system of production. It is this central insight, and the wider politics that Battistoni engages with, that make the book valuable at a time when concepts like “Natural Capital” are the dominant ones by which environmental movements approach nature. It is an analysis that points us towards the revolutionary strategy that the workers’ and environmental movement needs.

Wednesday, December 31, 2025

Ben Ware - On Extinction: Beginning again at the end

It seems fitting that my last book review of 2025 is "on extinction". After all, this year once again broke records for temperature, extreme weather, floods and so on, and also saw a failed climate COP. The human cost of these tragedies is growing, and the outlook is bleak. But Ben Ware's On Extinction is not a catalogue of disaster, nor an interrogation of the science, or indeed a historical study like Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction.

Ware's book is an attempt to grapple with how we understand extinction philosophically and the limitations of what he calls "progressive liberalism". In other words the book is a critique of how we think about the end of the world and what we imagine can be constructed instead. I will admit that I approached the book with some trepidation - I am not someone for whom philosophy comes naturally. That said Ware's book was accessible, stimulating and I was carried along by his easy prose.

At the heart of the book are two related discussions. The first is the aforementioned inability of liberal political thought to construct an alternative to capitalism that can avoid catastrophe even in the imaginations of the liberals. The second is the concept of revolution. Revolution is an essential alternative to capitalism's logic of accumulation ("moses and the prophets", says Marx). It is capitalism that is dragging us under, but it is also the only framework most people have - witness a host of books written by well meaning academics and writers anxious about the future, but ideologically unable to imagine anything different.

Ware says that in 1921, the Marxist Walter Benjamin described "capitalism as a demonic cult, 'perhaps the most extreme that ever existed'." Capitalism is, for Benjamin, a celebratory cult where there is no break, no holiday, every day "demands the utter fealty of its worshippers". Ware contines:

In the first instance, the demonic figures as a kind of bad infinite: it is surplus-producing activity without cessation - activity that threatens the complete destruction of human existence... a crucial second sense... [capitalism] establishes guilt/debt as the organizing principle of social relations."

The second demonic sense Benjamin explains is that this guilt/debt causes the "expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world." What does guilt/debt/despair mean in this context?

Our guilt/debt is part of the compulsion to behave in a particular way. To spend, to work, to obey. And in doing so we acccept we will live in a system of exploitation and oppression, war and homelessness, poverty amid plenty. But for the capitalist it might refer to the compulsion they experience to endlessly accumulate due to the competition inherent in the system. We have seemingly no choice but to sell our labour, and buy their commodities. They have to behave in a particular way too. Ware analyses this through a brief study of the popular series Squid Game (which I haven't seen). The winner of that (imaginery) game carries with them, the "guilt-burden" of everyone else's failure. Or, "their new-found wealth remaining permanently indebted to a system of suffering, exploitation, and sadistic enjoyment". That at least is not fiction.

Ware concludes however by saying that "we might say that the only thing one is certain of under capitalism is one's guilt... but this then creates an issue that Benjamin does not exxplore... how to deal with accumulated guilt."

Ware points out that for Marx the vampire of capitalism sucks the life blood from the worker, it is a "mechanical monster" whose "demonic power", "drains the life-energy from the body of every man, woman and child". But crucially for Marx the worker is also the "active agent of political change, the potential motor of world history". For Marx this potential for revolutionary transformation is the hope. But for many revolution is not about fundamental change, it is about internal change.

Ware looks at this through a discussion of Kant. Ware says:

For Kant, one becomes morally a 'good' person only through a 'revolution' in one's 'disposition';, through a kind of 'rebirth' or 'new creation'... political enlightenment, but contrast, can only be achieved 'slowly', by a gradualist movement from worse to better... In relation to the French experiment, what matters is not the revolution itself but instead the way in which it allows enthusiastic spectators to extract moral and aesthetic capital form it. What Kant thus appears to want is revolution without Revolution.

Here I think Ware nails things exactly in relation to contemporary politics:

What we encounter here then... is a version of torday's 'progressive' left liberalism: a politics that is bringin with enthusiasm when it comes to 'looking at' the burning issues of the day - ecological devastation, accelerating inequality, the threat of nuclear war - but which... has not the slightest intention of activiely participationg in anything that would change the political and economimc conditions from which these problems emerge.

Think of all those failed COP meetings, the heart-searching articles and books by the likes of Bill Gates, or countless academics, whose hope is to reinvent capitalism or defang it to make it all nicer. The alternative has to be revolutionary. Here Ware returns to despair, but this time reconstructed as a potential force to encourage change:

By opening outselves uip to the force of despair, we arrive (potentially at least) at a properly political truth: the problems we confront cannot be resolved within the existing framework, and so it is the framework itself that must be transformed.

It is a powerful conclusion and reminds us of the power of philosophy. Ware's book is a polemic, but it is not one that I expected - it left me enthused and stimulated, and enlightened (in the best sense). But it is also encouraging that at least in Ware's response to extinction the working class, as a class, is at the heart of his answer. On Extinction covers a lot of ground in its 150 pages. Ware touches on a host of philosophers and thinkers, and many cultural milestones (some of which are quite obscure). Nonetheless this is a stimulating book that will provoke plenty of debate, argument and inspiration too.

Related Reviews

Dawson - Extinction: A Radical History
Kolbert - The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

Wednesday, December 24, 2025

Paul Frölich - Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg was one of the most remarkable revolutionaries to emerge from the European socialist milieu in the late 19th century. There is a tendency on the left to discuss Luxemburg in the context of things that she wrote or did that were wrong. I've been to many meetings which bemoan her failure to "launch a revolutionary party" early, rather than staying part of the German Social Democratic Party, hence dooming the German Revolution. These are, of course, crude criticisms even if they do have some basis. Nonetheless it is important that we say, as Lenin did:

'Eagles may at times fly lower than hens but hens can never rise to the height of eagles'. Rosa Luxemburg was mistaken on the question of the independence of Poland; she was mistaken in 1903 in her appraisal of Menshevism; she was mistaken on the theory of accumulation of capital; she was mistaken in July 1914, when, together with Plekhanov, Vandervelde, Kautsky and others she advocated unity between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks; she was mistaken in what she wrote in prison in 1918 (She corrected most of these mistakes at the end of 1918 and the beginning of 1919 when she was released). But inspite of her mistakes she was and remains for us an eagle. And not only will Communists all over the world cherish her memory, but her biography and her complete works will serve as useful manuals for training many generations of communists all over the world.

Paul Frölich's biography of Luxemburg was one of the very first to be written, and was published in unusal circumstances just before World War Two. In fact the English translation became a huge best seller as part of the Left Book Club during the War. It is very much a political biography that places her ideas in the context of her political activty and her organisational context. The Lenin quote above matters not just because of his list of criticisms, or indeed his celebration of Luxemburg's work - but his acknowledgement that her ideas changed in the context of struggle. Indeed part of the celebration of her work that Lenin mentions was impossible because the archive that Frölich built up was trapped by Stalin during WWII and kept from the movement.

What shines through is Luxemburg's understanding of political theory and strategy, based always on working class power. For instance, in the great debate within the German left about how the left should organise and the role of parliamentary activity, Frölich says that Luxemburg

did not insist merely on agitation: the task of a socialist parliamentarian also consisted in taking part in the positive legislative work, whenever possible with practical success-a task which would become increasingly difficult with the strengthening of the party’s representation in parliament. The task could be correctly fulfilled only if Social Democracy retained an awareness of its role as an oppositional party and, at the same time, found the golden mean between sectarian negation and bourgeois parliamentarism-always remembering that its real strength lay outside parliament, in the proletarian masses. Above all, however, it had to give up without reservation the illusion that a working-class party could overpower a capitalist state by a majority vote in parliament, i.e. solely by parliamentary means.

Nonetheless it is clear that the context of Luxemburg's main area of work - the German socialist movement - did have its impact on her throught. Frölich's book is very much a celebration of Luxemburg's work and life - but he isn't uncritical. But in one area he does acknowledge mistakes - her debate with Lenin over the question of political organisation.

This first disagreement between her and Lenin-even if all the various background factors are taken into consideration-nevertheless revealed characteristic differences between these two great leader personalities. Luxemburg underestimated the power of organisation, particularly when the reins of leadership were in the hands of her opponents. She relied all too believingly on the pressure of the revolutionary masses to make any corrections in party policy. Lenin’s total political view prior to 1917 shows traces of unmistakably Blanquist influences and an exaggerated voluntarism, though he quickly overcame it when faced with concrete situations. To overstate the point, it can be said that Rosa concerned herself more with the historical process as a whole and derived her political decisions from it, while Lenin’s eye was more concentrated on the final aim and sought the means to bring it about. For her the decisive element was the mass; for him it was the party, which he wanted to forge into the spearhead of the whole movement.

This is a much better approach than the "she didn't set up a revolutionary party" argument. Not least because it is clear that Luxemburg did always fight for revolutionary organisation, and I was reminded that the Polish group she led played such a role in the crucial war years and during the 1917 revolutionary period.

Perhaps the most interesting discussion of Luxemburg's "mistakes" are in her work on the accumulation of capital. Here again there's a tendency for some reviewers simply to say that she was wrong. Yet in doing so they miss Luxemburg's real attempt to grapple with the limits of Marx's own work on accumulation (born out of his abstraction of the economy from reality in order to clarify his argument) and the fact that she was one of the first to link accumulation to imperialist expansion. She was also, it should be said, someone who was very clear about the role of imperialism in the destruction of indigenous peoples. Her theory here may not be fully developed, but it is a very real attempt to place a Marxist critique of capitalism into a global context.

Luxemburg's work also included two other great pieces of work that developed revolutionary politics to adapt to new eras. Her Reform or Revolution and The Mass Strike both remain indispensible booklets for socialists in the 21st centutry as we grapple with the interactions between social movements, capital and political organisation. The Mass Strike in particular will no doubt be read again and again as workers engage in mass struggles over austerity and politics. The "Gen X" revolts spring to mind.

But it is in the last four years of her life that Rosa Luxemburg comes into her own. Her fight to shape a new revolutionary era out of the ruins of the betrayal of the German socialist movement at the start of World War One and then her attempts to learn from and extend the revolutionary epoch after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Here Frölich engages with her criticisms of the Russian Revolution and the policies of the Bolsheviks, particular towards the National and Agrarian questions. He acknowledges her errors, while placing them in context. Not least the fact that Luxemburg was in prison and had limited access to the movement at times. Nonetheless we see how Luxemburg is constantly striving to develop the movement, and with the outbreak of the German Revolution we she how her politics place her far ahead of almost all her comrades. Her clarity of ideas in December 1918 and January 1919 with the counter-revolution flexing its muscles is poignant given her murder by them in early January.

There is no doubt that the loss of Luxemburg robbed the German working class of one of its most able leaders. Frölich's book is one of the best introductions to her life and politics, but it is also an incredible celebration of working class power and the vision of socialism from below that Luxemburg strived for her whole life. If at times it feels a little hagiographic this is, perhaps, to be expected given that Frölich is writing in the darkest period for humanity as Hitler has won and Stalin's politics is stamping over the revolutionary tradition that Paul Frölich's subject stood for.