Abstract
The Salvage Collective is a group of academics, public intellectuals and writers who endeavour to resurrect a communist vision in contemporary ruin. The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards the Proletarocene is a manifesto that begins where Marx and Engels finished. Repeating the lines, ‘[w]orkers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win’, Salvage then asks, but ‘[w]hat if the world was already lost?’ (2021: 1). The Communist Manifesto was written when its authors saw the massive changes in material conditions, ushered in by industrialization and the collectivization of labour, as teeming with potential. The potential for abundance made possible through these more efficient and communal modes of production could birth a post-scarcity society. Today, it is hard to sense this utopic impulse. Given the environmentally destructive nature of the industrial capitalism, that metabolic rift which leaves whole ecosystems decimated, Salvage asks how the proletariat can re-imagine communist horizons. How can we build an emancipatory project that reconceptualizes abundance out of devastation? Unflinchingly tracing the lines from the inherently destructive nature of the capitalist logic itself to material examples of the consequences of that logic, Salvage demonstrates that mitigation is no longer an option. Adaptation is the only way forward. If adaptation is to be emancipatory, the relationship between the metabolism of capital, the worker and the asymmetrical effects of the climate crisis must be understood as a class issue. As such, despite the ways that the capitalist class protects itself through green capitalism and global climate summits, the relentless drive for surplus-value that is inherent to capitalist accumulation is fundamentally incompatible with a world that is just to all the species inhabiting it.
The hegemonic nature of capital has infiltrated our understanding of energy, science and discovery. Indeed, much of our reliance on carbon-intensive energy is bound to capitalist growth and the ever-increasing productivity that it furnishes. Salvage devotes some time to looking at conceptions of ecology in the early USSR. There, through the science of Vernadsky, we can understand the earth’s ecology and geology as a process of cocreation and interdependence. While this influenced early Soviet policy, it could not survive the ocean of capitalism, the military–industrial complex, global White supremacy, and the now rising eco-fascism that has informed our politics, our media and our horizons. Capitalist production is deeply entangled in carbon-intensive industry. Through the lens of Malm’s work, Salvage reframes the tragedy of the worker, showing that how fossil fuels satisfy the M-C-M′ logic that produces surplus-value. It is the human flow of energy through labour-power that fuels climate collapse. Salvage writes that Capital isn’t hungry for energy in the way a machine or living body is. It grows on the value added to it by human labour. It doesn’t just rip open stock of purified carbon deposited by ancient life, with utter disregard for ‘externalities’. Its relationship to non-human energy is structured by its dependence on human energy, its extraction of fossil energy a byproduct of its extraction of caloric energy, purchased as labour-power and converted into economic value . . . The labour theory of value is a theory of our apocalypse. (The Salvage Collective, 2021: 40)
This is a modernization of the metabolic rift described by Marx et al. (1990) as how, ‘Capitalist production . . . disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and earth . . . simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker’ (pp. 637–638). The proletariat manufactures the climate crisis; this is another tragedy of the worker.
Given the inevitability of environmental collapse, a new Salvage Communism is proposed: a collective project that aims to preserve life while acknowledging that humans cannot be passive actors within the earth’s systems. Salvage Communism is an emergent strategy. It is pessimistic about the fate of the planet as an act of realism, yet optimistic in that it seeks to build in ruin. Although the dream of abundance as it has historically been imagined may be dead, this is a call to dream of new forms of abundance.
It is precisely due to the Promethean scale of the project to utterly reconfigure the world and thus the humans who will remake it that we can know neither their capabilities nor their drives and desiderata in advance. This is not evasion but rigor . . . Not only do we not claim that speculation about a post-capitalist future is verboten, we hold it to be necessary. But we must be clear about the categoric nature of those ruminations, the veil between us and prediction. (The Salvage Collective, 2021: 80)
Meeting the climate crisis head-on is going to be a large-scale project that requires not just cooperation, but a change in perception. Salvage, call[s], not for a Deep Ecology, but for a Deep-Historical-Materialism: the extension of materialist theology into the realm of geologic ‘Deep Time’: of paleo-ontology, paleo-oceanography, and paleo-climatology. [they] call for an aleatory materialism, a materialism of the encounter, which recognized life as a fluke worth preserving, and human existence as a lucky ‘spandrel’, a contingent byproduct of earthly extinctions . . . a ‘Great Work’. (The Salvage Collective, 2021: 89–90)
The Salvage Collective has created an ambitious and biting dissection of the climate crisis today. They do so with points of theory spliced together with alarming figures that illustrate just how damaged our planet is and decimated it is likely to become. While the manifesto would be more cutting had the empirical points been better referenced, the argument remains convincing. The way they knit together the death drive of capital, labour-power and the tragedy of the worker is elegant. Marx could not have predicted the impacts of fossil capitalism in his time; however, the environmental impact of the gnawing and insatiable hunger of capital were visible. 150 years later, this observation seems more poignant than ever. It is time that the worker refuses to dig their, and the world’s, grave. The Salvage Collective here adds an uncompromising voice to that vision.