Autonomist Marxism and World-Ecology: For a Political Theory of the Ecological Crisis

by Emanuele Leonardi

Translated by Giada Ferrucci

Introduction – Autonomist Marxism and World-Ecology: elements for a definition

This paper aims to articulate an “encounter” between operaismo (Wright, 2017 - in English literally “workerism”, but often referred to as “Autonomist Marxism”, from now on AM, highlighting a horizon of worker autonomy from capital) and World-Ecology (Moore, 2015a - from now on WE), that is, between two theoretical paradigms increasingly discussed globally, but until now never juxtaposed (§1). The purpose of the essay is to show that, although the two perspectives relate to the question of the (ecological) crisis in a very different way (§2), they can be effectively integrated if placed in communication on a different level, that of the historical-political analysis of the environmental issue (§3). From this plausible “convergence”—which is actually a rather demanding theoretical exchange, such as to require some renunciation of both positions—a political interpretation of the contemporary ecological crisis can finally emerge. Such interpretation is capable of questioning the relationship between capitalism and nature, avoiding the difficulties of both catastrophism and the elective affinity between the logic of profit and the logic of environmental protection.

AM can be defined as follows: from a historical point of view, the elaboration of workerism is closely linked to the conflict cycle of the 1960s and 1970s in Italy. In this context, at least a few magazines and political groups should be mentioned: Quaderni Rossi, Classe Operaia, and Rosso, on the one hand; on the other, Potere Operaio and Autonomia Operaia. From a methodological perspective, the workerist option unfolds through four steps: the partiality of the point of view, the constitutive unity of thought and conflict, the ambivalence of the working-class condition (labor force / abstract labor within capital, working class / living labor against capital), and the centrality of class composition (Filippini and Tomasello, 2010). Lastly, from a political point of view, the two main innovations of AM were the practice of refusal of work, theorized among others by Sergio Bologna and Antonio Negri—on which I will elaborate further—and the Copernican revolution elaborated by Mario Tronti, according to which class struggle comes first and capitalist organization follows suit (instituting, therefore, a causal and incremental link between workers' unrest and capitalist development).

Finally, it is appropriate to underline the specific modality through which, starting from the 1990s, a second moment of workerist reflection "territorializes contemporary French philosophy in the field of Italian beyond-Marxism [oltremarxismo]" (Chignola, 2015, p. 32), in particular the issue of biopolitics as posed by Michel Foucault. The Foucauldian toolkit, especially the notion of neoliberal governmentality, is mobilized by post-workerism to question the emergence, starting from the crisis of the social-democratic welfare state models, of a new strategy of capitalist accumulation based on: 1. the centrality of the sphere of reproduction; 2. the financialization of the economy; and 3. the cognitization of work (Fumagalli, Giuliani, Lucarelli and Vercellone, 2019). The historical junction from which post-workerism enters into tension with the concept of crisis is therefore twofold: on the one hand, the collapse of the social dynamics that had supported the so-called “Glorious Thirty Years (1945-1975) of capitalism; on the other, the elements of societal “creative” destruction that, starting from the 1980s, characterize the increasingly hegemonic project of neoliberalism. In passing, it must be said that both of these passages, and the relevance of criticizing them from an ecological standpoint, have been thoroughly analyzed by the most attentive strands of political ecology (Pellizzoni, 2019).

As for the WE, the essential reference of such a global conversation (Leonardi and Pellizzoni, 2019) is represented by Jason Moore, a Marxist sociologist known above all for having developed the analysis of the world-system proposed by Giovanni Arrighi and Immanuel Wallerstein in the direction of an in-depth approach to environmental issues. This led to world-ecology, a proposal according to which capitalism does not have an ecological regime but is itself an ecological regime, that is, a specific way of organizing nature. Beyond any residue of Cartesian dualism, the concept of world-ecology refers to an original mixture of social dynamics and natural elements that make up the capitalist mode of production in its historical development, in its tendency to become a world-market. In this framework, the capitalist theory of value imposes space as flat and geometric, time as homogeneous and linear, nature as external, infinite, and free.

In particular, the notion of abstract social nature allows us to better understand the specific terms through which "nature" is internalized in the valorization process as an enabling yet invisible limit—that is, a necessary condition for capital and wage labor to meet, but not a factor directly involved in the act of creating value. Moore identifies the epochal transition from land to work as the primary source of productivity, which took place during the long sixteenth century, the conditio sine qua non for the internalization of nature into value. What does this mean? It means that, for valorization to occur, the vital activities of which nature is an expression must be transformed in such a way as to conform to the logic of value. A framework emerges that, schematically, we can summarize as follows: abstract social labor—that is, wage-labor organized by capital and measured in discrete units of labor time—is the only source of value located in the sphere of production. However, for the mechanisms of value-creation (which Moore defines as the area of commodification or accumulation by capitalization) to be set in motion, it is necessary that a large amount of unpaid (and therefore unwaged) labor be made available to capital. Moore calls this movement accumulation by appropriation: it defines the sphere of abstract social nature in which the elements traditionally relegated to the sphere of reproduction (housework, slave work, environmental “free gifts”) converge. These subjects of reproduction, it is worth reiterating, can function as a condition for value only on the condition that they are “accounted for” as infinite and free (again: enabling yet invisible). To sum up:

Capitalist technics seek to mobilize and to appropriate the (unpaid) “forces of nature” so as to make the (paid) “forces of labor” productive in their modern form (the production of surplus value). This is the significance of the production of nature; nature is not a pre-formed object for capital, but a web of relations that capital reshapes so as to advance the contributions of unpaid biospheric “work” for capital accumulation. Capital, in so doing, is reshaped by nature as a whole. (Moore, 2014, p. 295)

A good example of Moore's argumentative strategy is represented by coal: through WE it is possible to accurately reconstruct how the social relations that emerged starting from the sixteenth century transformed coal from simple rock into fossil fuel, as well as the set of biological, physical and geological knowledge necessary to make the very concept of “fuel” conceivable/usable. It follows that the development of production based on coal would have been inconceivable apart from the value relations established in early modernity: “the prejudice of green materialism tells us that ‘coal changed the world.’ But is not the reverse formulation more plausible? New commodity relationships transformed coal (at the same time activating its epochal power)” (Moore, 2017, pp. 53-54).

2 - Collapse or development? Contrasting readings of crisis theory (starting with Marx)

Although both AM and WE establish a constitutive relationship with Marx’s thought, the results they reach—particularly in relation to the concept of crisis—are distant. After all, Marx's own thought in this regard is both simple and problematic. Simple, because there is no doubt that crisis makes concretely visible both capitalist contradictions and the intrinsic limits of capital’s development. Problematic, because a plurality of different perspectives co-exist; I believe it is necessary to mention at least three of them: crisis of exhaustion of the industrial reserve army, crisis of overproduction, and crisis of realization (Bellofiore, 2012). Moreover, these crises are installed on an insoluble and foundational tension between the revolutionary element of analysis—which intends to overthrow bourgeois society—and the scientific one—which instead aims at accurately describing the way the system works (Colletti, 1970). Summarizing in a few lines a very long debate, it can be affirmed that the common point of all Marxisms lies in the necessary character of the crisis for the expansive dynamics of capitalism—which arises precisely as a volatile mode of production, “forced” from an iron internal logic to constantly revolutionize and broaden the basis of its own accumulation—while the disagreements focus on both economic causes (excessive supply or insufficient demand?) and political outcomes (collapse or development?).

In the comparison that I propose in this article between AM and WE, attention is focused on the second object of the dispute. Early workerism and the subsequent analysis of biopolitical production, in which the total subsumption of society (not of labor) to capital would have been achieved, consider the crisis as a factor of development (initially) and of development governance (subsequently). After all, this is a coherent landing for both Tronti's Copernican revolution, first working-class struggle then capitalist restructuring, and with the Foucauldian reversal of the relationship between power and resistance, where the latter becomes an affirmative force and the former a reactive force. Already in a letter from Tronti to Raniero Panzieri dated June 30, 1961, we can read:

The problem of capitalist development cannot be separated from the problem of crises. For this fact - that the crisis is a moment of capitalist development [...] The analysis of the crisis can only be a dynamic analysis of the system, that is, the analysis of the dynamics of the system. Hence the impossibility of thinking about the final crisis in terms of a catastrophic collapse. The more one thinks about it, and the more one becomes convinced that the knot to be solved today is all here - in this difficult marriage between capitalist development and workers' revolution [...] It is precisely from this material union that the new socialist experiment must be born (Tronti in Trotta and Milana, 2008, p. 118).[1]

The central core of the Trontian analysis is proposed and extended by Negri in an essay originally written in 1968 and entitled “Marx on Cycle and Crisis”. That such reinterpretation of crisis theory by Negri is truly remarkable can be deduced from the admiring comments of an otherwise merciless critic like Riccardo Bellofiore, who at first defined it as "of considerable suggestion and depth" (1982, p. 102) and later on "brilliant, in its own way" (2008, p. 299). Basically, Negri believes that Marx's reflection is adequate for nineteenth-century capitalism. At the same time, the horizon of the 1960s is marked by the "complete restructuring of the power relations" imposed by the October Revolution, to which collective capital had responded earlier with the New Deal, that is, with the integration of the working class into the capitalist development mechanism, and then with the Fordist pact embodied in the welfare state (1972, p. 199). In this context, crisis ceases to be the other of development; rather, it shows itself as its essential element. It is only through crisis, in fact, "that profit appears as a general capitalist figure, as the true face of the functioning of the law of value," and it is only the discourse on crisis-necessity that "gives the system a figure of profound understanding of reality" (1972, p. 202). On this basis, and at this point beyond the New Deal (i.e., beyond Tronti’s perspective), Negri can focus his attention on the fully Fordist form of the crisis-development nexus through John Maynard Keynes and, above all, Joseph Alois Schumpeter:

In Keynes, the central moment of analysis is the one that wants development as the aggregative rhythm of social production forces; in Schumpeter, the central moment is that of the revelation that [...] aggregation can only take place on condition of being in relationship with continuous disaggregation and reform of the process. In the first, development would like to be an alternative to the crisis; in the second, development is a new whole figure in the cycle, and so it understands the crisis and uses it as a function of the cyclical trend. However, the two moments are complementary: they are integrated into the awareness of the need to use the working class’s mass pressure and its control and rigid reduction in the mesh of the dynamic process of development. They give singular clarity to the most recent capitalist practice. (1972, p. 203)

The categorical rejection of any theory of collapse and the attempt to grasp the concept of crisis starting from the historical conjuncture can be found in the analysis of the financial collapse of 2007-2008 that post-workerism provides. In particular, three points seem significant to me: 1. it is a new type of crisis: although financialization is no way a new phenomenon (for instance, Marx's articles for the New-York Daily Tribune in the late 1850s provide an excellent analysis of financial speculation), its contemporary centrality and pervasiveness makes the opposition between real and financial economy obsolete. This does not mean that the latter has absorbed the former. Rather, it suggests that the two elements must be thought as distinct but inseparable. They are not the same thing, but outside of their relation they lose their meaning as interpretative categories. (Mezzadra and Fumagalli, 2009); 2. finance plays a productive and not parasitic role: "This crisis is not simply the result of financial madness, it must instead be understood starting from the specificities of the existing accumulation regime" (Lucarelli, 2009, p. 101). Finance is directly and actively involved in the production of surplus value and, as a consequence, this crisis is financial and real in its very essence; 3. finance is the cornerstone of neoliberal governmentality: for the financial markets to manage the production of surplus value on a global level, ever greater shares of the population must directly depend on it. This dependence manifests itself and acts through various forms of credit, social insurance, and wealth effects. As a result, "financialization [is] the current form of capitalist command" (Negri, 2009, p. 231). More than ten years after the explosion of the subprime bubble, and in the absence of signs of economic recovery, post-workerism maintains the pre-eminence of the crisis-development link but articulates it around two different poles. The first, proposed by Dario Gentili, recovers the Gramscian concept of interregnum to show how the blocking point in the dynamics of biopolitical capitalism is not destined to be resolved but can instead continue indefinitely in a sort of suspension between life and death (2018). The second, articulated by Negri and Michael Hardt, re-proposes the topicality of the element of political rupture (no longer by the working class but by the multitude), arguing that "the constituent antagonisms of social, cooperative and cognitive production arise within financial capital and hit its extractive mechanisms to the heart" (2018, p. 269). Furthermore, the enormous environmental impact of the accumulation regime driven by finance should not be underestimated: a paradigmatic example, but certainly not exclusive, is the constitutive relationship that links financial speculation and land grabbing (Fairbarn, 2014; Benegiamo, 2021).

As for WE, its fundamental contribution is to highlight the ecological dimension of crisis theory. Firstly, Moore traces back to Marx the analysis of an environmental blocking point in the capitalist dynamic: the crisis of underproduction (of “generous and gratuitous nature”, to recall Ricardo’s wording). Given the need for accumulation to incorporate ever-increasing shares of cheap natural activity and unpaid human labor to maintain the "structural assumption of the increase in the composition of the value of capital" (Avallone, 2015, p. 19), it follows that every cycle of development is faced with an intrinsic "tendency to fall in the ecological surplus" (Moore, 2015a, p. 108), that is, the ratio between the total mass of capital and the share of nature and free labor. This depends on the fact that "the rate of profit decreases or increases in inverse ratio to the price of raw material" (Marx 1973, p. 146), which tends to rise as the availability of free nature and labor decreases due to the acceleration of accumulation rates. Thus, the underproduction crisis (of a “free” nature) reveals the ecological dimension of overproduction crises (of commodities).

Secondly, WE provides a convincing reconstruction of the historical succession of long waves of economic cycles precisely through this articulation of underproduction and overproduction. There is no space here to discuss the transition from the long “Dutch” sixteenth century to the long “British” eighteenth century and how US hegemony succeeded in the long twentieth century. However, it is possible to focus on the last cycle of cheap nature production and exhaustion. This allows us, on the one hand, to detect a substantial identity of periodization with the AM approach, and on the other hand to underline the persistence in WE of an ultimately “doomy” attitude, albeit very different from the so-called “classic” one (i.e., located in the debate within the Second International between 19th and 20th centuries).

In regard to the first aspect, Moore locates in the first half of the 1930s, in the United States—that is, in conjunction with the New Deal—the deep root of the Green Revolution as the process of innovation of agricultural practices (based mostly on the extensive use of pesticides and industrial fertilizers), which led to a significant global increase in yields between the 1940s and 1970s.[2] Starting from Nixon's declaration of the end of the dollar convertibility into gold in 1971, and the first Oil Shock of 1973—two key events in the workerist interpretation of the decline of Fordism—agricultural productivity stagnated and with it the production of cheap nature. According to Moore's analysis, the rhetoric of "green" biotechnologies, which would have supported the financial transposition of food commodities, shows all its inconsistency with the 2003 crisis (a very close relative of the collapse of dot-coms in 2001; both would eventually flow into the great recession that began in 2007-2008). Here too, the periodization of WE and AM coincide. Furthermore, WE provides an instrumental ecological counterpoint to the socio-centric reading of AM through the fundamental notion of negative value—the most innovative element of Moore's analysis with regard to the neoliberal form of crisis theory. Writing of “the transition from surplus value to negative-value” he observes that:

In this transition, the “old” contradictions of depletion are meeting up with the “new” contradictions of waste and toxification. The old productivist model—the law of Cheap Nature—has been adept at finding fixes to resource depletion. But it is ill suited to dealing with negative-value, those forms of nature that elude and frustrate Cheap Nature “fixes.” Superweeds are clearly expressive of this tendency. They can now be controlled only with great toxification and greater cost. Meanwhile both direct and indirect toxification from capitalist agriculture feeds, with increasing force, into new forms of negative-value: climate change, cancer epidemics, and so forth. (Moore 2015, p. 274-275)

Having established a proximity in terms of periodization, I now come to indicate an important divergence that directly concerns the issue of the outcome of the crisis, that is, the alternative collapse-development. Although sui generis, it seems to me that Moore's reflection re-proposes the essential elements of the “collapsing” debate; two authors who resonate in the works of WE seem to me to be Rosa Luxemburg (2012) and Henryk Grossman (2010). Now, it is certain that Moore does not resort to the classic style of the “red-green version of the theory of collapse,” the fundamental feature of which is the substitution of physical limits to market anarchy as the incurable contradiction of capitalism (Bellofiore, 1988, p. 21). In his analysis, the question of environmental finitude does not arise either as a “second” contradiction, that is, alongside the “first”, between capital and wage labor (O'Connor, 1989), nor as an accumulation of catastrophe (Bellamy Foster, 2011). On the contrary, it appears as a dependent variable of the production of nature as external, infinite, and free. However, the discursive strategy follows that of every breakdown theory ever since the “classical” debate. Therefore, it is aimed at showing that, although the crises of the twentieth century were developmental (that is, they fostered the capitalist restructuring at a higher level), the crisis we live through nowadays presents itself as epochal in that its result is deemed to be an inevitable collapse. This attitude can be easily seen both in the identification of an unprecedented form of underproduction crisis, which with the advent of neoliberalism becomes the “general law of overpollution” (Moore, 2015b, p. 271)—that is, the tendency to exhaust more and more quickly the waste frontiers[3]—and in the frequency of vaguely apocalyptic statements such as “The shift towards financialization, and the deepening capitalization in the sphere of reproduction, has been a powerful way of postponing the inevitable blowback. It has allowed capitalism to survive. But for how much longer?” (2015, p. 305).

3 - Worker's genealogy of the environmental question and political centrality of the ecological crisis

So far I have tried to describe a "simple" overlap between AM and WE, in which the former provides a correct setting of the social horn of crisis theory while the latter reveals its underlying environmental dimension. This is certainly a necessary analytical first step as it embodies both the antagonistic element brought about by struggles, crucial for AM, and the "capitalocentric" perspective of WE. The attempt here is to keep together the subjective and the objective side for an assessment of contemporary capitalism, assuming the possibility of a collapse and that of an unpredictable re-organization, without taking one option or the other for granted. However, my argument requires an additional step, since the mixture of alternative approaches at the same analytic level would represent a contradiction. Therefore, I will try to frame the articulation of AM and WE along different but intersecting discursive lines—lines that, to be traced, require both a prior recognition of the non-self-sufficiency of both perspectives and a mutual renunciation of some foundational assumptions.

Firstly, it is necessary to question how the ecological crisis becomes, at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, a political issue in the proper sense, that is, unavoidable for all the players involved, and at all scales. An important distinction must be made here between environmental degradation, examples of which can be found in every age and society, and ecological crisis, which finds its direct cause in the capitalist way of organizing labor, depending on the need for accumulation and growth that characterizes the profit-motive. In this context, a further specification is necessary: although it is customary to date the widespread politicization of environmental issues between the mid-seventies and the following decade (Della Valentina, 2011)—that is, after the great cycle of Fordist conflicts—in recent years a different and more radical hypothesis has been tested. From this perspective, such politicization took place not only a decade earlier, but also and above all thanks to, and not despite, the struggles of the labor movement (Leonardi, 2017a), both the “official” one and the “revolutionary” one (Rector, 2014; Citoni and Papa, 2017; Davigo, 2017). Stefania Barca suggests the evocative term worker environmentalism to describe the formation of a partisan knowledge about the work environment that refused to be ignored or bullied: “The workplace was seen as a particular type of ecosystem, and the class worker was the one who knew it best "(Barca, 2011, p. 103; Barca, 2020). In fact, the struggles against noxiousness[4], which multiplied between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, often in opposition to the confederal unions, are the first to fiercely criticize the so-called monetization of risk, that is the idea that wage increases and/or organizational benefits could “compensate” for exposure to pollutants, even hazardous ones (Milanaccio and Ricolfi, 1976; Sacchetto and Sbrogiò, 2009). Of course, this criticism will never become common sense of trade union action, whose legacy at the end of the seventies is to be considered “rather negative” since “the introduction of slightly better safety measures” was “subordinated to companies’ policies implemented from time to time” (Davigo, 2017, p. 176). But this does not deny that it was first of all the strength of organized workers that blew up the compensatory mechanism and (im)posed the ecological question as unavoidable. Only at a later stage will the environmental movement emerge along with a new post-materialist sensitivity among the urbanized intermediate strata (Inglehart, 1997).

It seems to me that two important elements can be added to this picture: the first is that the struggles against noxiousness of the 1968-1973 cycle (which are situated within abstract social labor) would not have had the disruptive impact that, in fact, they had if they were not connected to wider conflicts that in that period certified the unprecedented centrality of the subjects of the sphere of reproduction (which are situated within the abstract social nature). Feminism, decolonization movements, grassroots environmentalism: these are the excluded from the social-democratic welfare state that brought at the social level, that of qualitative struggles, the political potential of the ecological crisis uncovered by the workers' movement. This latter movement, however, failed to express a unitary strategy in this regard: rather, a tension emerged between prospects for the liberation of work—supported for example, by Bruno Trentin, the secretary of the Federation of Italian Metal Workers (FIOM in its Italian acronym) at that time, and by sectors of the Italian Communist Party—and prospects for the liberation from work, namely the ambition to free oneself from work, endorsed by workerist organizations (Potere Operaio first, Autonomia Operaia later on). Both options situate their analysis beyond the wage level and are thus configured as critiques of the logic of (exchange) value - they operate what Karl Heinz Roth defines as the “trespassing of wage struggles” (2009, p. 152). Nevertheless, they have different and not easily reconcilable horizons. The first considers it possible, so to speak, to "redeem" wage labor in the name of work in a generic sense, as human activity in which the individual expresses her authentic personality. It would be a question of de-alienating wage labor through workers' control of the production process so that each worker’s irreducible singularity can eventually develop (Barca, 2017). On the other hand, the second option preaches the refusal of work[5] as an activity imposed by capital. This rejection is meant not only to address a radical critique of wage labor (labor-fatigue, work-employment, expropriated labor), but above all, to abolish value tout court and reaffirm the logic of wealth (based on use value) through watchwords such as “reduction of working hours,” “reduction of rhythms,” “refusal of noxiousness for the right to health,” and “equal wages for all” (and detached from productivity).

According to Nanni Balestrini and Primo Moroni (2005), the inability to reconcile these two options—and, I add, to connect them more closely to the struggles of the subjects of reproduction—led to the defeat of the 1968-1973 cycle of struggles. Instead of workers' power over the qualitative composition of production, there was the very violent reaction of capital: the shattering of labor (and of its organizations), the dismantling of the welfare state, and accelerated financialization. However, it should be noted that the defeat of the “season of movements” was peculiar. In the thrust of the struggles there was, in fact, a change in the structure of capitalist valorization in the direction of an expansion of its accumulation base. The causes of this transition are to be found in the intersection between the financialization of the economy, the cognitization of labor and, above all, the becoming-productive of the sphere of social reproduction. In other words, the transition should be read as the attempt by capital to turn its own blocking point into a driving force. In fact, what else is the green economy if not the attempt to internalize the environmental constraint and transform it from a barrier to a business opportunity through the creation of ad hoc markets? To reiterate, the green economy postulates an elective affinity between the logic of profit and the logic of environmental protection, and that is the core of the “revolution from above” it set in motion.[6] Workerist historian Sergio Bologna grasped such key element as early as 1988; it was nothing more than an intuition, to be sure, but a very relevant one, especially if read in retrospect. In an article for the journal Primo Maggio, he wrote, “Capital needs environmentalism to reach the frontier of a new industrial revolution” (1988, p. 8).

However, this does not mean that the crisis has been smoothly resolved by a higher stage of capitalist development. If this were the case, the green economy would work perfectly, while all the data, including those of the most enthusiastic supporters, show the opposite (Ronchi, 2018): a clear contradiction between the (putative) ecological goal and the (actual) economic means of environmental markets. In fact, although no ecological improvement has been made, a significant amount of value has been created and then transferred to fossil fuel-intensive companies through the production of what can be called climate rent.[7] Sure, one may argue that, to solve the impasse, it would suffice to reverse the terms of the contradiction and thus privilege the ecological goal over economic means. But it is precisely here that the incurable tension in which the green economy is captured can be fully appreciated. To be successful, it should renounce growing / accumulating (reproduction-become-productive can no longer be conceived as subordinate, infinite, and gratuitous). However, since it assumes accumulation / growth as its own raison d’être, the green economy quite simply cannot afford to do so. Thus, it seems reasonable to say that within a regime of accumulation driven by finance, reliant on a digital infrastructure and characterized by the becoming-productive of social reproduction, the political significance of the ecological crisis is an indisputable fact (Torre, 2020).

Concluding Remarks: A New Perspective Based on AM and WE

Against this background, I suggest a more in-depth “encounter” between AM and WE. The current crisis, the first in which the ecological question assumes entirely political significance, presents itself simultaneously as development and anti-development. Moore clearly grasps the second aspect through the concept of negative value, which correctly conveys the message that climate change, health-related emergencies, and the narrowing of waste borders make the ecological crisis an unprecedented everyday reality in the history of capitalism. In fact, negative value implies an internal contradiction of the dynamics of capital and, above all, an ontological challenge to the valorization project, therefore to “capitalist civilization” tout court (2015b, p. 278). However, Moore is wrong to consider this impasse as necessary: “unpaid work can—and often is—measured (as in ‘ecosystem services’); but it cannot be valued” (p. 300).

The question that escapes WE, and which in my opinion can be grasped through AM, is that the logic of value is by no means "dependent on dualism" (2015b, p. 292). The fact that capital accumulation, up until the 1970s, has rested on the “fictive” separation of internal society and external (plus infinite & free) nature does not imply that it must rest on such a dualistic account of reality in order to operate. Focusing on cutting-edge green economy projects, Luigi Pellizzoni has aptly shown how the post-dualistic indeterminacy that characterizes both geo-engineering and bio-technologies does not represent an obstacle to the deployment of capital; rather, it acts as the premise of a “new mastery of nature” (2019, p. 11).[8] In other words, there is a shift from the rhetoric of limits to growth, which somehow alluded to environmental noxiousness as a crisis of capitalism, to a rhetoric of growth of limits, which identifies these latter as drivers of accumulation, as “filters” that turn the ecological constraint into a crisis for capitalism (Pellizzoni, 2018).

Furthermore, it is possible to argue that commodities traded on environmental markets contain value as they are produced by hybrid units of labor (reproductive / informational) and nature (financialized) (Leonardi, 2019). However, the developmental potential of this post-dualistic green economy must also be relativized. Not only because “from the fact that capital posits every such limit as a barrier and hence gets ideally beyond it, it does not by any means follow that it has really overcome it” (Marx, 2012, p. 274), but also and above all because the process of enhancing the “free” activity of nature seems, at least until now, to be unable both to "repair" the environmental damage already done and to provide widespread social protections potentially able to compensate for the class polarization that invariably accompanies the multiplication of financial dividends. What neoliberal capitalism lacks—repetita juvant, at least until now—is an inclusive mechanism capable of (partially) socializing financial profits either through a decarbonization of the economy, or through the formation of a new middle class (or both). A good way to grasp this friction is indicated by André Gorz who, in one of his latest interviews, defines the growing divorce between value and wealth in the following way:

Producing, and producing more and more, is therefore not a problem [...] The problem is the gap, which never ceases to deepen, between the ability to produce and the ability to sell profitably, between the producible wealth and the commodity form, the value form that wealth must necessarily play to be produced within the framework of the economic system in force. (Gorz, 2008, p. 136)

From this friction – which has deepened also from an ecological point of view and thus has not surprisingly been taken up in recent years by thinkers related to AM (Vercellone et al., 2017) - does not derive the impossibility of commodifying nature in ways which are different from the typically dualistic ones that modernity has known up until the decline of Fordism. What actually derives is “only” the difficulty of neoliberal capitalism in building an institutional architecture that is capable of producing both financial profits and redistribution aimed at social consensus. Neither breakdown theory nor crisis-development automatism; simply, we are left with an ancient certainty that is proposed under new guises, that is “that capitalism neither collapses mechanically nor evolutionistically comes out of itself, and that therefore its overcoming is not conceivable except on the basis of a political intervention” (Napoleoni, 1970, p. LXX). It goes without saying that the form of this intervention will have to take into account both the mechanisms of valorization of globalized capital and the relations between the classes that exist in it. The analysis of the latter aspect would require an additional article to be completed. However, three elements can be indicated as avenues for future research. Firstly, placing the discussion about the outcome of the crisis into brackets— thereby avoiding both “inclination-towards-collapse” and “inclination-towards-development”—could allow transformative subjects to focus their practical-theoretical attention on the desirable elements of ecological transition. Secondly, it is necessary to question the relationship between the extreme localization of environmental conflicts and the global scale of the effects of the crisis, for example of climate change, building a bridge between grassroots autonomy and the configuration of ecology as a wider space for political recomposition (Torre, 2017). Finally, it will be decisive to establish an inextricable link between the ecological transition of economic infrastructures and class struggles in the XXI century: those are the two sides of the same coin since the fight against inequality is the first objective of every environmental conflict worthy of the name.

Bibliographical references

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Armiero, M. (2021- forthcoming). Wastecene. Cambridge University Press. 

Avallone, G. (2015). Introduzione. In: Moore J. Ecologia-mondo e crisi del capitalismo. La fine della natura a buon mercato. Verona: ombre corte.

Balestrini, N. e Moroni, P. (2005). L’orda d’oro 1968-1977. Milano: Feltrinelli. Available in English as Balestrini, N. And Moroni, P. (2020). The Golden Horde: Revolutionary Italy, 1960–1977. Chicago: Seagull Books.

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Notes

[1] Many thanks to Michele Filippini for informing me of the existence of this letter.

[2] Harry Cleaver convincingly argued that the Green Revolution should be interpreted as a "post-war effort aimed at containing social revolutions and safeguarding world profitability" (1972, p. 177). In other words, Cleaver puts forward the hypothesis of a close connection between the global increase in agricultural productivity due to technological innovations and the resolutely anti-communist foreign policy of the United States. Therefore, apparently more productive seeds present themselves as a strategic weapon in the Cold War, that is, as a counterpoint to the specter of revolts in Asia and Africa.

[3] A brilliant elaboration on such issue is in Armiero (2021).

[4] Lorenzo Feltrin and Devi Sacchetto (2021) use “noxiousness” to translate the Italian word nocività, which “refers to the property of causing harm. Through its use by the labour movement, it came to encompass damage against both human and non-human life, hence it can be translated neither as ‘(human) health damage’ nor as ‘(non-human) environmental degradation’”.

[5] Such is the common translation of the Italian rifiuto del lavoro. In my opinion, a better translation is “refusal of (wage) labor”.

[6] Another way of saying the same is this: the 1968-1973 cycle of struggle led by social reproduction imposed a bifurcation within the value-nature nexus: whereas, before it, “nature” was perceived as infinite and free (“classical” value-nature nexus), after it started to be seen also as a direct element of valorization (“new” value-nature nexus). It is important to stress that the “new” nexus does not substitute but rather supplemente the “classical” one: this is why the internal conflict between “brown” and “green” capital is not an ideological smokescreen but a rather dire, actual battle.

[7] My take on ‘climate rent’ diverges from other insightful approaches, such as Felli’s (2014) and Andreucci et al’s (2017). Felli argues that carbon credits or permits should not be considered as commodities, since no socially-necessary labour time is crystallized in them. Thus, carbon trading would not constitute a new accumulation strategy since the pseudo-commodities exchanged in it are merely public entitlements to emit greenhouse gases. As such, they are essential components of climate rent, rent being assumed as “a distributional – not a productive – relation that plays a contradictory role in the dynamics of capital” (Andreucci et al 2017: 8). In my opinion, the three processes described above – exploitation of social reproduction, financialization and cognitization/digitalization – produced a bifurcation (not an exhaustion) in the theory of value. Besides the environment as “free” and “infinite”, contemporary capitalism posits “nature” as internal element of circuits of valorization. As a consequence, carbon commodities do contain crystallized abstract social labor; simply, this labor is irreducible to chronological time as measuring unit. Carbon commodities should then be considered as bundles of labor-nature vehicled by information and exploited by the market logic. The value carried by carbon credits does not come from a tree or from the ocean, but rather from their sinking potential as politically calculated to fit financial markets' accounting strategies; not from a seed but from the genetic sequence that makes it resistant to biotech pesticides.

[8] Moore’s “hybridist” (i.e. non-dualistic) ontology has also been criticized for being philosophically flawed and politically disempowering (Malm, 2018). It is a legitimate critique, which deserves careful consideration; such a scrutiny, however, would take us too far from the purposes of this article. What I would like to stress here, in fact, is a different point, which concerns the link between exploitation and nature. Moore is right in arguing that the former has historically required, to properly function, the latter to be “capitalized” as an external background. This, however, seems to be no longer (completely) true if we look at the kind of value-creation (hence, exploitation) which occur on a variety of putatively “environmental” markets, and in particular in carbon trading (Leonardi, 2017b).