The left knows the climate is breaking down. It has known for long enough that the knowing has itself become a kind of politics, a substitute for the harder work of understanding what produces the breakdown and what kind of force could actually stop it. What has emerged in place of that understanding is a discourse fluent in catastrophe and structurally committed to explaining it in terms that leave capital untouched. This is not an accusation of bad faith. It is a description of a political form and its limits.

That form is moralism. Not environmentalism as such, not the tradition of ecological thought that runs from Marx through to the present, but the specific ideological register that now dominates left-adjacent climate politics: the grammar of responsibility and guilt, the aesthetics of urgency without adequate theory of causation, the displacement of structural questions onto individual conduct. Its vocabulary is familiar. Carbon footprints. Complicity. The demand that we consume differently, fly less, eat less meat, perform our awareness of the crisis in the approved register. Its political expressions range from the mildly irritating to the actively disorienting: the lifestyle campaign that mistakes the symptom for the disease, the NGO framework that mistakes advocacy for power, the Green New Deal liberalism that mistakes state investment for a challenge to the valorisation imperative.

What unites these expressions is not their specific content but their shared incapacity. Moralism cannot name capital as its object, because to do so would dissolve the framework. If ecological destruction is produced not by bad values but by the structural imperatives of a mode of production, then the question is not how to make individuals more responsible within that mode of production but how to end it. That conclusion is not available to a politics organised around personal conduct and institutional pressure. It requires a different kind of analysis altogether.

The question of why left climate discourse has converged on this form is worth pausing on briefly, because the answer is not simply intellectual failure. The moralist turn has determinate social conditions. The decades in which it consolidated were also the decades of organised labour’s defeat, of the hollowing out of the political forms through which a class-based challenge to capital had previously been mounted, and of the consequent migration of left-wing energy into NGOs, campaigns, and single-issue movements operating largely within the terrain capital defines. A politics that cannot name the systemic character of the problem is not irrational given those conditions. It is the form that left-wing sentiment takes when the organisational capacity for a structural challenge has been broken. Understanding the moralist turn requires understanding the defeat that produced it.

But understanding its origins does not rehabilitate its conclusions. The defeat of the organised working class is not an argument for a politics that accommodates to it. It is an argument for a politics that seriously confronts what would be required to reverse it, and that refuses to substitute moral performance for that confrontation. The left climate discourse that has developed in the absence of working class organisation is not a holding position to be superseded when better conditions arrive. It is actively reproducing the conditions of its own inadequacy, training a generation of ecological activists in a framework that cannot think the problem it claims to address.

What it cannot think is the structural logic that makes ecological destruction not an aberration of capital but one of its normal products. That argument requires a different theoretical foundation than moralism can supply. The next task is to establish what that foundation actually looks like.

II. What Moralism Cannot See

The first move moralism makes, and the one that determines everything that follows, is to locate the cause of ecological destruction in the wrong place. The cause is not greed, not short-sightedness, not the wrong values held by the wrong people. These may describe the phenomenology of capitalist behaviour. They do not explain it. What explains it is the structural position of capital within a mode of production whose organising imperative is the self-expansion of value, and whose indifference to ecological consequences is not a correctable defect but a condition of its normal functioning.

The circuit of capital is M-C-M prime: money advanced to purchase commodities, including labour power and means of production, in order to produce commodities that realise a greater sum of money than was advanced. What drives this circuit is not the use-value of what is produced. Capital is indifferent to use-value except insofar as it is the necessary vehicle of exchange-value. The imperative is valorisation, the expansion of value through the extraction of surplus labour, and this imperative is not chosen by individual capitalists but imposed on them by competition. The firm that does not accumulate is displaced by the firm that does. The structural pressure is unrelenting and it operates independently of the intentions, values, or ecological awareness of the people who occupy the relevant positions within it. This is the point moralism cannot reach: that the problem is not who is running the system but what the system requires of whoever runs it.

From this structural position, three mechanisms of ecological destruction follow with something close to necessity.

The first is externalisation. Value, in Marx’s technical sense, is constituted by socially necessary labour time. What this means for ecological analysis is that natural processes and conditions, insofar as they are not the product of labour, do not enter into the value composition of commodities. The atmosphere, the hydrological cycle, the fertility of soil, the stability of climate systems: these are conditions of production that capital draws on without those costs appearing anywhere in the accounts. Externalisation is not a market failure in the sense that mainstream environmental economics uses that term, as a deviation from an otherwise functional pricing mechanism that could in principle be corrected. It is constitutive of how value is produced under capitalism. The capacity to treat nature as a free sink and a free source is not incidental to accumulation. It is built into the structure of the value form itself, which registers only what labour has produced and is indifferent to what it has consumed or destroyed in the process.

The second mechanism is the discount rate. Capital does not only externalise costs spatially, displacing them onto nature or onto populations with less power to resist. It also externalises them temporally, displacing them onto the future. The discount rate is the mechanism by which future costs are systematically devalued relative to present returns, and its operation within capital allocation decisions means that any ecological consequence sufficiently remote in time is effectively weightless in the calculations that determine investment. This is not irrationality. It is the rational behaviour of capital operating within its own time horizon, which is the valorisation cycle. A consequence that falls outside that horizon does not register as a cost. The compounding ecological damage of two centuries of industrial capitalism is in large part the accumulated product of innumerable individually rational discount rate calculations, each of which treated the future as somebody else’s problem because the structure of capital accumulation made that the only calculation that made sense.

The third mechanism is the structural separation of production decisions from their ecological consequences. The firm that decides to extract, emit, or deplete does not bear the costs of what it extracts, emits, or depletes. Those costs are distributed across populations, ecosystems, and time in ways that have no mechanism of return to the point of decision. This separation is not accidental. It is reproduced by the property relations of capitalism, which vest decision-making authority over production in those who own the means of production, while distributing the consequences of those decisions far beyond any boundary the property relation recognises. The result is a systematic and structural disconnect between the locus of decision and the locus of consequence, which no amount of information, awareness, or moral pressure can close, because it is produced by the structure of property, not by the attitudes of property owners.

These three mechanisms operate simultaneously and reinforce one another. Externalisation means ecological costs do not appear in price signals. The discount rate means future ecological costs are systematically discounted even when they are acknowledged. The separation of decision from consequence means there is no feedback mechanism by which ecological damage is returned to the point at which it is produced. Together they constitute not a market failure but a structural feature of capitalist production as such, one that operates independently of regulatory environment, corporate culture, or the personal commitments of those who manage capital.

It is worth noting, briefly, what this structural analysis forecloses before the argument has fully developed. If ecological destruction is produced by these mechanisms, then interventions that leave the mechanisms intact cannot resolve the problem they claim to address. A carbon price that internalises some fraction of externalised costs while leaving the valorisation imperative untouched does not address externalisation as a structural feature of the value form. It prices one specific externalisation in one specific market while the general condition that produces externalisation continues to operate across every dimension of capital’s relation to nature. The same logic applies to cap and trade schemes, green investment programmes, and the various instruments of ecological modernisation that assume the problem is a correctable distortion of an otherwise functional system. Whether those instruments have any tactical relevance is a separate question, to be addressed later. The prior question is theoretical: what kind of problem is this, and what kind of solution does that imply? The structural analysis gives an answer that the policy instruments in question are not designed to hear.

What the structural analysis requires, and what moralism systematically refuses, is a theory of the capital-nature relation at the level of the mode of production itself. That theory exists within the Marxist tradition. Its most rigorous formulation is the concept of the metabolic rift.

III. Marx and the Metabolic Rift

The concept of metabolism enters Marx’s thinking not as a metaphor but as a category. In the Grundrisse and developed more fully in Capital Volume I, Marx describes labour as the process by which human beings mediate, regulate, and control the material exchange between themselves and nature. This exchange, the metabolic relation between human productive activity and the natural world, is not a background condition of social life. It is its material foundation. Human beings are natural beings before they are social ones, and their social organisation is always simultaneously an organisation of their relation to nature. Production, in Marx’s account, is never the transformation of raw materials into commodities by abstract labour. It is always the transformation of nature by human beings who are themselves part of nature, drawing on natural conditions they did not create and reproducing or failing to reproduce the conditions on which future production depends.

What capitalism does to this metabolism is the subject of Marx’s most sustained ecological analysis, concentrated in his treatment of large-scale agriculture and soil exhaustion in Volume I and developed through his extensive engagement with the agrochemist Justus von Liebig. The argument is precise. Capitalist agriculture, by concentrating production, separating town from country, and shipping food and fibre across increasing distances, breaks the cycle by which the nutrients taken from the soil in production would naturally be returned to it. The constituents of the soil, the nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium that make agricultural production possible, are metabolised into commodities and exported to urban centres where they end as waste, discharged into rivers and eventually the sea rather than returned to the land. The result is a systematic and cumulative degradation of the natural conditions of production, a rift in the metabolic relation between human society and the earth that capitalism opens and cannot close within its own logic.

John Bellamy Foster’s recovery and systematisation of this argument, developed across Marx’s Ecology and subsequent work, has been the most influential intervention in eco-Marxist theory of the past three decades. Foster’s contribution was to demonstrate that Marx’s ecological thinking was not incidental or peripheral but constitutive of historical materialism as a project, that the materialist conception of history required a materialist conception of nature, and that the metabolic rift concept was not an analogy borrowed from natural science but a rigorous theoretical category developed from within Marx’s value theory. The rift is not a poetic description of environmental damage. It is the name for what happens to the labour-nature metabolism when production is organised around the valorisation imperative rather than the reproduction of the conditions of human and natural life.

The debates this reading has generated are substantive and cannot be set aside as merely academic. The most important challenge comes not from outside eco-Marxism but from within it, and the work of Andreas Malm is where the tension is most productively developed. Malm’s Fossil Capital offers a different entry point into the capital-nature relation: not the metabolic disruption of natural cycles but the specific historical choice, made by British capital in the early nineteenth century, to substitute fossil energy for water power in the organisation of industrial production. Malm’s argument is that this choice was not technologically determined or economically inevitable in any simple sense. It was made because steam power, unlike water power, was spatially mobile and temporally controllable, and because those properties served the specific interests of capital in its relation to labour: the ability to locate production in dense urban centres where the labour market was deep, and to run machinery according to the demands of the valorisation cycle rather than the rhythms of rivers. The roots of the climate crisis are therefore not simply in the structure of the value form in the abstract but in a specific historical configuration of the capital-labour relation that produced fossil energy dependency as one of its consequences.

The tension between these two frameworks is real and worth holding open rather than dissolving. Foster’s metabolic rift theory operates primarily at the level of the value form and its structural indifference to natural conditions of reproduction. Malm’s fossil capital argument operates at the level of the historical development of the productive forces and the specific class determinations that shaped that development. These are not simply compatible perspectives that can be added together. They imply different emphases on where the crisis is located, what reversal would require, and crucially, whether there is anything in the productive forces developed under capitalism that could be appropriated for a post-capitalist ecology or whether the productive apparatus itself is so thoroughly shaped by the requirements of capital that no such appropriation is possible. This is the Promethean tension within the Marxist tradition: between the view that capitalism develops productive forces that socialism inherits and redirects, and the view that the productive forces developed under capitalism are not neutral instruments but bear the imprint of the social relations that produced them, relations of exploitation and domination that include the domination of nature.

Neither position, stated as a general thesis, is fully adequate. The metabolic rift concept is correct that the structural logic of capital accumulation systematically disrupts natural cycles in ways that cannot be addressed by reforming the incentive structure around the edges. But Malm is correct that the historical specificity of fossil capitalism matters, that the particular form the capital-nature antagonism has taken is not simply deducible from the value form in the abstract but required specific historical conditions and class struggles to produce. What the two frameworks share, and what distinguishes both from moralism, is that neither locates the problem in the attitudes, values, or choices of individuals operating within the system. Both locate it in the structure and history of the system itself, and both therefore imply that the resolution of the problem requires the transformation of that system rather than the reformation of behaviour within it.

This is the point at which the theoretical argument returns to its starting target with some force. Recall what moralism offers as its account of causation: the wrong choices made by insufficiently aware or insufficiently responsible agents, choices that could in principle be made differently within the existing structure of production if only the relevant agents could be persuaded, pressured, or incentivised to change them. Against this, the metabolic rift concept and the fossil capital argument, for all their differences, are united in a single and devastating response: the problem is not the choices made within the structure but the structure within which choices are made. The rift between human society and natural metabolism is not produced by bad decision-making. It is produced by a mode of production whose normal and successful operation requires the systematic disruption of the natural conditions on which all production ultimately depends. No quantity of moral pressure, consumer campaign, or awareness-raising can close a rift that is opened not by ignorance or malice but by the valorisation imperative operating exactly as it is supposed to.

What a politics adequate to this analysis looks like is the next question. The theoretical work done here does not generate a programme automatically. But it does establish, with some precision, what a programme would have to address and what it cannot afford to leave intact.

IV. The Political Consequences of Theoretical Evasion

If the metabolic rift is produced by the valorisation imperative operating normally, then the political conclusion that follows is not complicated to state, even if it is extremely difficult to act on. The valorisation imperative must be brought under conscious social control, which means the decisions about what is produced, how, at what rate, and with what relationship to the natural conditions of production, must be removed from the logic of capital accumulation and made subject to democratic determination oriented toward human and ecological reproduction rather than the self-expansion of value. Everything else is a subsidiary question: what institutions carry that transformation, what transitional programme moves toward it, what class forces have an interest in achieving it. These are real and hard questions. But they are subsidiary to the prior one, which is whether the political formation in question is organised around that objective or around something else. Most existing ecological politics is organised around something else, and the theoretical evasion of the structural analysis is what makes that possible.

The political forms that moralism generates follow directly from its account of causation. If the problem is individual behaviour, the solution is behaviour change: consumer campaigns, lifestyle politics, the apparatus of personal carbon accounting that asks individuals to audit their conduct against a standard the structure of production makes it largely impossible to meet. If the problem is market failure, the solution is market correction: carbon pricing, cap and trade, the various mechanisms by which environmental economics proposes to internalise externalised costs without disturbing the valorisation imperative that produces externalisation as a structural feature. If the problem is insufficient political will among existing elites, the solution is advocacy, lobbying, and the application of pressure to institutions that are constitutively organised around the interests of capital. Each of these political forms is the direct expression of a theoretical position, and each theoretical position is one that stops short of the structural analysis the situation requires.

This does not mean that every formation operating within these limits is tactically irrelevant. The relationship between tactical utility and strategic adequacy is not one of simple equivalence, and a materialist politics is not obliged to refuse every instrument that falls short of the final objective. A carbon price that raises the cost of specific emissions may have some effect on some investment decisions at the margin. A Green New Deal programme that directs state investment toward renewable infrastructure creates material conditions, employment relations, and political constituencies that a socialist politics could work within and against. These are not nothing. The error is not in using what is available but in mistaking what is available for what is sufficient, in treating the tactical instrument as if it were the strategic answer, and in building the political formation around the instrument rather than around the objective the instrument cannot reach.

Green New Deal liberalism is the paradigm case of this error at the current conjuncture, and it deserves precise rather than wholesale criticism. The GND framework, in its various national iterations, correctly identifies the scale of public investment required, correctly argues that the transition cannot be left to market mechanisms alone, and correctly insists that the costs of transition must not be borne by those who bear least responsibility for the crisis. These are not trivial concessions to structural thinking. They represent a genuine advance on the pure market environmentalism that preceded them. The problem is what the framework leaves intact: the private ownership of the means of production, the investment decisions of capital, the valorisation imperative that will ensure any green investment programme is bent toward the requirements of accumulation rather than the requirements of ecological reproduction wherever the two diverge. A GND that decarbonises the energy system while leaving the structure of production intact has not addressed the metabolic rift. It has electrified it.

The programme question is where the theoretical stakes become most concrete. A programme is not a wish list or a statement of values. It is a specification of the transformations that would actually move the situation from its present condition toward the objective. For ecological politics, a programme adequate to the metabolic rift has to address the valorisation imperative directly, which means it has to address the ownership and control of production. Not because public ownership is a fetish or a sufficient condition in itself, but because the decisions that produce the rift, what to produce, at what rate, with what relationship to natural conditions, are currently made by capital according to capital’s criteria, and no amount of regulatory pressure, pricing mechanism, or state investment can fully override those criteria while the structure that generates them remains intact. The programme question for ecological politics is therefore inseparable from the broader question of socialist transition: what transformations of ownership, planning, and democratic control would bring production under the kind of conscious social direction that could actually manage the human-nature metabolism rather than systematically disrupting it.

This is the conclusion that the existing ecological left has largely refused to draw, and the refusal is not accidental. Drawing it requires abandoning the terrain on which most ecological politics currently operates: the terrain of pressure, advocacy, and reform within a capitalist framework that is treated as given. It requires instead the construction of a political force organised around the objective of transforming that framework, which means organised around the working class as the social force whose position within production gives it both the interest and the potential capacity to bring production under conscious social control. The NGO cannot do this. The consumer campaign cannot do this. The cross-class climate coalition organised around the urgency of the crisis without agreement on its causes cannot do this. Not because these formations are populated by people of bad faith, but because the objective exceeds what their organisational form and political logic make possible.

What would make it possible is the harder question, and one that cannot be answered at the level of ecological politics alone. It requires settling accounts with what the left has inherited on the question of nature, production, and socialist transformation, including the parts of that inheritance it has been most reluctant to examine.

V. The Left’s Bad Inheritance on Nature

The Marxist tradition does not arrive at the question of ecological crisis without baggage. It arrives with a substantial and largely unexamined inheritance on the relationship between production, nature, and human emancipation, an inheritance that has not prevented the development of sophisticated ecological Marxism but has consistently limited its uptake within the actually existing left. Settling accounts with that inheritance is not a gesture of self-criticism for its own sake. It is a precondition for the kind of theoretical clarity that a materialist ecological politics requires, and it cannot be deferred on the grounds that the external enemy is more pressing. The tradition that holds historical materialism to the standards it sets for everything else is obliged to apply those standards to itself.

The theoretical tendency that produces the problem can be located precisely. It lies in a specific reading of the forces and relations of production schema that runs from certain strands of the Second International through to its twentieth century inheritors, a reading in which the development of the productive forces appears as the primary motor of historical progress, socialism as its culmination, and the task of socialist politics as the completion and rational reorganisation of the productive development that capitalism has begun but cannot finish. In this reading, the problem with capitalism is not that it produces the wrong things, at the wrong rate, with the wrong relationship to natural conditions of reproduction. The problem is that it develops the productive forces in a contradictory and anarchic way, generating crises and immiserating the class that operates those forces, when what is required is their planned and rational development under social ownership. Socialism, on this account, is essentially a more efficient and more equitable version of industrial capitalism, inheriting its productive apparatus and directing it toward human rather than private ends.

The historical conditions that generated this reading are not difficult to identify, and identifying them is part of the argument that productivism is an accidental rather than necessary feature of the tradition. The socialist movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries developed in contexts of material scarcity and underdevelopment where the expansion of productive capacity was a genuine and urgent human need, where the misery of the working class was visibly a product of insufficient development as much as of exploitation, and where the contrast between capitalist irrationality and socialist planning appeared most naturally as a contrast between anarchic and organised industrialisation rather than between industrialisation and something else. The Soviet experience consolidated this tendency under conditions of even more extreme pressure: the imperative of rapid industrialisation in a context of encirclement, underdevelopment, and military threat produced a version of socialism whose self-image was explicitly productivism, the conquest of nature by human labour as the content of socialist construction.

These are historical explanations, not excuses. The point is not that productivism was inevitable given the circumstances but that it was produced by specific circumstances that are not permanent features of the situation and whose grip on the tradition should therefore be tractable to theoretical criticism. The forces and relations schema, read carefully and without the teleological overlay that the productivist tradition imposed on it, does not in fact commit historical materialism to the view that the development of productive forces is an unconditional good or that socialism inherits the capitalist productive apparatus without transformation. Marx’s own account of the metabolic rift, his analysis of how capitalist agriculture systematically degrades the natural conditions of production, his insistence that socialist production would have to consciously manage the human-nature metabolism rather than simply expanding throughput: none of this is consistent with productivism as a political programme. Productivism is a reading of historical materialism, a historically conditioned and theoretically distorting one, not a necessary consequence of it. A corrected Marxism can shed it, provided it is willing to acknowledge that there is something to shed.

The existing left has been largely unwilling to do this, and the form its unwillingness takes is instructive. The dominant response to ecological politics within the Marxist and broader socialist left has not been outright rejection. Outright rejection would at least have the virtue of clarity, of forcing a confrontation with the theoretical stakes. The dominant response has instead been assimilation without transformation: the absorption of ecological demands into existing political frameworks without any corresponding revision of those frameworks, a process that leaves the productivist inheritance intact while adding a green coating that is shed the moment it comes into conflict with the underlying commitments.

The symptoms of this assimilation are visible at every level. At the level of programme, it appears as the addition of environmental demands to existing socialist platforms without any examination of whether those demands are consistent with the growth and development logic that organises the rest of the platform. Public ownership of energy, investment in green infrastructure, a just transition for workers in fossil fuel industries: these are not wrong as far as they go, but they are typically presented as extensions of an existing socialist programme rather than as implications of a transformed understanding of what socialist production is for. The question of whether a socialist economy oriented toward ecological reproduction would look like a publicly owned version of the current economy with different energy sources, or whether it would require a fundamentally different relationship to production, consumption, and growth, is not posed. It is dissolved into the existing framework before it can do its theoretical work.

At the level of theory, assimilation without transformation appears as the treatment of ecological Marxism as a specialism, a subfield to be acknowledged and incorporated rather than a set of arguments with consequences for the foundations of the political project. Foster’s metabolic rift theory, Malm’s fossil capital argument, the broader tradition of eco-Marxist thought: these are cited, occasionally taught, and then set aside while the main business of socialist theory continues on productivist assumptions. The result is a tradition that can gesture toward ecological sophistication without having actually undergone the theoretical revision that ecological sophistication requires. It knows the right references. It has not done the work.

The cost of this failure is not primarily rhetorical or reputational, though it is those things too. The cost is political. A left that has not settled accounts with its productivist inheritance cannot offer a coherent account of what socialist production would actually look like in a world constrained by ecological limits, cannot speak honestly to the working class about what a just transition requires and what it costs, and cannot distinguish its own programme from the green capitalism it nominally opposes except by asserting a difference in ownership that, absent a transformation of the production logic itself, may amount to very little. The inheritance is not a minor embarrassment. It is a political liability of the first order, and treating it as anything less is itself a form of the theoretical evasion this publication exists to oppose.

VI. Towards a Materialist Politics of Ecology

The argument developed across these sections can be stated with some compression. Ecological destruction is not produced by bad values or insufficient awareness. It is produced by the structural imperatives of capital accumulation: by externalisation built into the value form, by the discount rate that renders future consequences weightless against present returns, by the systematic separation of production decisions from their ecological consequences. The metabolic rift concept names what this produces at the level of the capital-nature relation: a systematic and cumulative disruption of the material exchange between human society and the natural world that capital opens and cannot close within its own logic. The political forms generated by a moralist misdiagnosis of this problem are correspondingly inadequate, not because they are populated by people of bad faith but because their theoretical foundations structurally prevent them from addressing what they claim to address. And the Marxist tradition, which possesses the theoretical resources to do better, has largely declined to use them, absorbing ecological thinking into existing frameworks without the transformation those frameworks require. The result is a left that can describe the crisis with increasing sophistication and address it with decreasing adequacy.

What a materialist politics of ecology requires cannot be specified as a programme in advance of the political conditions that would make a programme realisable. That is not a counsel of passivity. It is a methodological point about what a programme is: not a wish list extrapolated from theoretical principles but a crystallisation of the actually available forces, contradictions, and possibilities of a given historical moment. What can be specified in advance are the questions such a programme would have to answer, and the standards against which any answer would have to be measured. These questions are three, and none of them has been seriously posed by the existing ecological left, let alone answered.

The first is the planning question. If the valorisation imperative must be brought under conscious social control, then the institution through which that control is exercised is democratic planning: the collective determination of what is produced, at what rate, with what relationship to natural conditions of reproduction. But democratic planning as a concept carries within it a tension that ecological politics makes acute. Planning adequate to the metabolic rift is not simply the aggregation of existing preferences through a democratic mechanism. Human preferences formed within capitalism, shaped by the commodity form, the advertising apparatus, and the systematic production of needs that serve accumulation rather than human flourishing, cannot be treated as the raw material of an ecologically adequate socialist production without transformation. The planning question for ecological politics is therefore not only how decisions are made but how the preferences that feed into those decisions are themselves formed, which is a question about education, culture, and the long transformation of needs that no transitional programme can resolve but that any honest programme must acknowledge as part of what is at stake. A materialist ecology that evades this tension by assuming either that existing preferences are sovereign or that a vanguard can override them is not taking the planning question seriously.

The second is the class question, and it is the one the existing ecological left has been most systematically evasive about. The transition away from a fossil-fuel-based, metabolically disruptive capitalism will impose costs. The question of who bears those costs is not a secondary consideration to be addressed after the ecological objectives have been set. It is constitutive of what the transition is. A transition whose costs fall primarily on the working class, on those whose livelihoods depend on the industries being wound down, on those with the least capacity to absorb rising energy and food prices, on the populations of the global south who have contributed least to the crisis and are most exposed to its consequences, is not a just transition in any meaningful sense. It is the latest in a long series of arrangements by which the costs of capital’s contradictions are socialised onto those least responsible for producing them. The class character of the transition is not a rhetorical commitment to be added to an otherwise technocratic programme. It is a specification of whose interests the programme actually serves, which means it is a specification of the class forces the programme must be organised around and the class forces it must be organised against. A programme that cannot name the latter is not a programme for transition. It is a programme for managed decline distributed inequitably, which is more or less what green capitalism already offers.

The third is the organisational question, and it is in some respects the hardest, because it requires the ecological left to confront what it has most consistently avoided: the question of power. A politics adequate to the metabolic rift requires transforming the ownership and control of production, overriding the investment decisions of capital, and subordinating the valorisation imperative to the requirements of ecological and human reproduction. No formation currently organised around ecological politics has either the intention or the capacity to do any of these things. The NGO cannot do them because its organisational form and funding base preclude the antagonism they require. The cross-class climate coalition cannot do them because the class whose interests are served by the existing structure of production is present within it and will not consent to its own subordination. The parliamentary green party cannot do them because the institutions through which it operates are constitutively limited in what they can demand of capital without provoking the investment strike, capital flight, and institutional resistance that have defeated every previous left government that has pushed against those limits without the organisational force to push back.

What could do them is a political force organised around the working class as the social force whose position within production gives it both the structural interest and the potential capacity to bring production under conscious social control. Not the working class as a sociological category to be appealed to, but as an organised political subject constituted through struggle, capable of exercising the kind of power over production that the metabolic rift analysis implies is necessary. The relationship between ecological politics and working class organisation is therefore not additive, a matter of adding green demands to a labour programme, but constitutive: the class question and the ecological question turn out, under rigorous analysis, to be the same question approached from different angles, the question of who controls production and in whose interests it is organised.

The left has not yet posed this question in those terms. It has maintained the separation between ecological politics and class politics that the theoretical analysis dissolves, treating them as allied causes requiring coalition rather than as a single problem requiring a unified political response. There is no ‘eco-socialism’, since such a description is necessary oxymoronic. The reasons for this are not entirely mysterious: the organisational separation reflects real social and political histories, the different constituencies and formations through which each politics has developed. But a separation that reflects historical contingency is not one that reflects theoretical necessity, and a left serious about the metabolic rift cannot indefinitely maintain a political division that its own analysis has shown to be untenable.

What the left must do differently is therefore not primarily a matter of adding the right ecological demands to existing programmes, or of finding the right coalition between existing formations, or of adopting the correct theoretical framework while leaving organisational practice unchanged. It requires recognising that the ecological crisis is a crisis of the capital-nature relation at the level of the mode of production, that addressing it requires transforming that mode of production, that transforming it requires a political force organised around the class with the structural capacity to do so, and that building that force is the prior condition of everything else. This is not a comfortable conclusion. It rules out most of what currently passes for ecological politics. It implies that the left’s existing response to the most serious crisis capital has yet produced is, at the level of both theory and organisation, inadequate to the situation.

Recognising that inadequacy precisely, without softening it into a call for broader coalitions or more ambitious reform programmes, is the beginning of a politics that might actually be adequate. It is not the end of one. The questions that remain, about the specific forms of planning, the specific content of transition, the specific organisational forms adequate to the working class as it currently exists, are large and largely unresolved. But they are questions that can only be seriously posed once the theoretical evasions that have prevented their posing have been cleared away. That clearing is what this article has attempted. The harder work begins after it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Monthly Review does not necessarily adhere to all of the views conveyed in articles republished at MR Online. Our goal is to share a variety of left perspectives that we think our readers will find interesting or useful. —Eds.