black mold

Ecology as Political Strategy

A meditation on the red-green debates, radical Indigenous philosophy and left-cybernetics

By Jack D. & J. Gibson

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A theory of ecology is a theory of political action.

In times of stagnation such as our own, when profits slow for the capitalists and we the workers find ourselves on the backfoot ideologically, politically and spiritually, the movement gets confused. We seek easy answers and relief in the NGO and the genocidal bourgeois political machine – anything to get the boot off our necks. We all but give up, becoming the cyclically in-vogue nihilists, career academics or other flavors of opportunists you tend to see in times like these. Real radicalism seems to go out the window. Who in their right mind would listen to someone trying to organize a worker’s council at their local Target or Popeyes or in their office?

Below, we are going to make the argument that the answer to this confusion is a philosophical clarification of what it means to have a theory of ecology. This zine will be a rambling meditation1 on, and examination of, the subject-object divide in its ecological and political manifestations. Clarifying the former will help clarify the latter…maybe – or maybe what follows will just be an experiment of marginal value. Who’s to really say.

Either way, our times are extraordinary in their complicated and all-encompassing character. We rely on each other and on our precarious ecological systems more than ever, and we need a political strategy that reflects that. We will begin with a survey of contemporary emancipatory green politics, taking what we can and jettisoning the rest, before moving on to a brief discussion of Indigenous ecological thought and finally ending with a consideration of what this all might mean to modern day left strategizing. 

RED-GREEN PARADIGMS

A PhD. in the so-called “red-green” debates can be summed up thusly: “Some people think Marx had an explicit ecology, other people think it was implicit. Some people think humanity is depleting nature at unsustainable rates, other people think there is only nature.” 

Since the disillusionment that followed the failure of 20th century socialism, new fractures in Marxism took root. Fractures that called into question even the possibility of a classless society. Postmodernism began asserting that there were no absolute truths and ecologists looked around at what was left of the Aral Sea and the mad rush to industrialize at all costs that had enveloped all of the “socialist” states and began to whisper that maybe Marx didn’t really have much of an ecology to begin with. He was too focused on the social, the human.

But then, others, who at least pretended to have read the first volume of Capital, saw that this simply was not the case. These thinkers were inspired (as far as we can tell) by the last two pages of Chapter 15 of Capital, specifically the passage that follows.

Capitalist production, by collecting the population in great centers, and causing an ever-increasing preponderance of town population, on the one hand concentrates the historical motive power of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the circulation of matter between man and the soil, i.e., prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil. By this action it destroys at the same time the health of the town laborer and the intellectual life of the rural labourer.2

In the passage above Marx briefly wrote about how capitalist agriculture was becoming less and less reliant on the natural fertility of the soil. To him, once peasants were kicked off their land in favor of propertyless wage laborers, an element of the natural fertility cycle was lost. Human waste was no longer used to fertilize the soil, leading to a break in the energy cycle of the interaction between humans and agriculture. Today, livestock and crop production are often separated into massive feedlots and monoculture farms respectively, furthering this metabolic gap by not only removing human waste from the fertilizer equation, but animal waste too.3

Now, would all of our agricultural woes be solved by simply reintroducing human and animal waste back into the crop nutrient cycle? No, of course not, and it probably isn’t fair to assume that’s what Marx meant either. Marx was using the rift in the metabolism of capitalist agriculture to make a point about the nature of capitalist production, namely that it is at the same time both progressive and disastrous. In his own words, “Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth-the soil and the laborer.”4

While Chapter 15 of Capital in general and the passage on soil fertilization specifically can be read as a metaphorical point about the energy circuit of capitalism, it is, in fact, a very practical argument. Marx is saying that, while in some respects, capitalism can be viewed as historically progressive, it comes at a catastrophic cost. Sure, it replaces “the irrational, old-fashioned methods of agriculture…[with] scientific ones”, yes it concentrates the “power of resistance” of the industrial working class living in the cities, but it also “…violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil”, and “by this action it destroys at the same time the health of the town laborer and the intellectual life of the rural laborer.”5 The point here is not so much about soil fertility as it is about the broader nature of capitalist production: how it promises so much in the way of progress while its own internal laws cause it to operate in a way that will one day see its collapse. It is simultaneously progressive and unstable – never able to live up to what it has always promised, namely, a free and rational society.

Regardless, the thinkers who wished to rescue Marx from accusations of Prometheanism (i.e. the charge that Marx wished to see human progress “conquer” and subdue nature) began using these ideas to preach the idea of the “metabolic rift”, a phrase designed to explain the unequal balance of energy in the human/nature dichotomy. Considering the functions of a mode of production as an energy circuit has its benefits. If we list all of the things needed to reproduce society (crops, chemicals, machines, labor, etc.), and then imagine a productive mode that uses those inputs at a rate faster than is possible to replace them, it’s pretty easy to see that our imagined productive mode won’t be productive for long. This is famously what Engels wrote about in The Condition of the Working Class in England when he described the unsustainable living conditions that the English working class was being exposed to. The perfect productive mode would be an entirely sustainable one that limits its appropriation of irreplaceable products to zero. No fossil fuels, no rhino horns, no helium.

However, this way of thinking obviously only gets us so far, and is the genesis for critiques of the metabolic rift school of the red-green debates. Simply put, when you are actually trying to come up with solutions to ecological issues, the metabolic rift is a poor guide. Take soil nutrients, as Marx did above. Even if we closed the fertilizer gap and pumped all of our shit back onto our fields at a 100% recycled rate (somehow), we would still need outside inputs. One of the most important nutrients of this type is phosphorus. One of the big three nutrients required by plant life, phosphorus is restored naturally in soil by weathering rocks. Today, due to the large scale of modern agriculture, this must be supplied artificially by industrial mining operations in several very specific regions of earth. In all of our research into sustainable agriculture, we have not found a single proposal that can do without at least some phosphorus supplied via mining. You are always going to lose more than you get back in the natural nutrient cycle of sustainable agriculture. A closed loop is impossible. 

Practically all operations that require mining fall into this unsustainable category that is vilified by the metabolic rift. But that’s of course fine, because the goal of socialism will be minimizing this rift by engaging in careful planning. But at that point, why even have a name for a philosophy based around an idea that every bourgeois “environmentalist” could tell you? It’s a term tinged with bourgeois thought, as it places humans at the center of our broader ecology, instead of recognizing our imprint on the world (including our mode of production) as part of a much bigger set of relations, the only upper limit of which being the entire universe.

“Okay, yeah dude, lay off the hashish” we hear you saying, and maybe that’s good advice, so we’ll lay off the vagaries and do our best to explain further.

One of the main disagreements among scholars in the red-green debates is the fundamental question of the subject-object divide. The subject is the entity of study that exhibits agency, whereas the object is the entity experienced by the subject in question. As this relates to typical environmentalism, the question becomes how does the subject (human society) interact with the object (our environment, e.g., useful resources, our habitat, all other species, etc.) in a sustainable way?

Posing the question with this framing of “us the humans” vs. our “external environment” comes with problems. This is bourgeois environmentalism, as it seeks a way to sustainably pillage our ecology. Environmentalism as such comes to designate

a mechanistic, instrumental outlook that sees nature as a passive habitat composed of “objects” such as animals, plants, minerals, and the like that must merely be rendered more serviceable for human use… Environmentalism tends to reduce nature to a storage bin of “natural resources” or “raw materials.” Within this context, very little of a social nature is spared from the environmentalist’s vocabulary: cities become “urban resources” and their inhabitants “human resources.” If the word resources leaps out so frequently from environmentalistic discussions of nature, cities, and people, an issue more important than mere word play is at stake. Environmentalism…tends to view the ecological project for attaining a harmonious relationship between humanity and nature as a truce rather than a lasting equilibrium. The “harmony” of the environmentalist centers around the development of new techniques for plundering the natural world with minimal disruption of the human “habitat.” Environmentalism does not question the most basic premise of the present society, notably, that humanity must dominate nature; rather, it seeks to facilitate that notion by developing techniques for diminishing the hazards caused by the reckless despoliation of the environment.6 (emphasis added)

Environmentalism, thus, is an attempt to philosophize the “rational” destruction of the natural world, hierarchically placing human needs above all else. This is not only bad philosophy, it’s bad practice. All over Western Europe, you’ll find incredibly densely packed, newly planted forests. In Ireland, for example, the most deforested country in Europe, a majority of its forests today are made up of fast growing conifer trees. These trees were planted to meet carbon neutrality targets and to provide for a growing timber industry. The bourgeois technocrat’s solution was simple: find the fastest growing trees that make the best timber and capture the most carbon and just go ham planting them wherever you can. Now you can look like an environmentalist and take pretty photos to entice tourists back to Ireland: RewildedTM. But of course, because these trees are not native to Ireland, they do not fit in well with the local ecology – their dense and acidic groundcover have created ecological dead zones where you have pretty trees, but no birds, flowers or meadows.

The criticism of environmentalism as opposed to ecology is representative of modern critiques of the metabolic rift. However, before we go further with these critiques, we’d hasten to state that the metabolic rift is not necessarily a bad idea, just that it is not sufficient. In fact, at one point it was certainly a progressive idea. But if left unchecked, it becomes just another philosophy that seeks to affirm the role of humanity as the dominator of “nature” instead of radically questioning it. A coherent and practically useful theory of ecology is one that recognizes a separation between humans and nature does not exist at the level environmentalism considers it to. This is obvious not just from a tree-hugging perspective like our own where we prioritize “useful” and “non-useful” features of our ecology just the same, but from a systems theoretic approach to ecology that prioritizes variety in complex systems. 

Emphasizing disruption and separation, rather than reconfiguration and unity, the metabolic rift has come to signify “a disruption in the exchange between social systems and natural systems.” Social systems, in this framework, are separate from natural systems. Social systems disrupt natural systems. As capitalism develops, the disruption of nature escalates, leading to “planetary crisis.” Catastrophe ensues.7 (emphasis added)

We might spout a load of gibberish like how humanity is just one part of a much broader, more complicated and beautiful ecology than we could ever imagine, but in reality it’s much more practical than that. Systems with more variety are more stable, and in a crumbling ecology like our own, we need to be planning for ecological variety at every opportunity. Every action we take as a society has an effect on the broader web of ecological relations. If we plant fast growing trees to operate at a carbon deficit we affect the local ecosystem. If we build a dam for renewable energy, we might affect trout migration patterns. But we also might not. These things are complicated, and a one size fits all approach to ecology such as this is doomed to fail. Capitalist social relations and bourgeois philosophy can never adequately address the complexity of the ecological problems we face. All they can do is green wash its plundering. The implementation of communist social relations will be the first step towards creating a planning system that not only produces for use instead of exchange, but that can properly situate its productive mode within our broader ecology.

But even this approach based on unity as opposed to separation is lacking. If we accept our place in our ecology as just another brick in the wall, no more or less important than any other, we lose sight of not just our capabilities but our responsibilities. What is needed is a theory of the ecological subject-object divide that emphasizes agency, and the potential for a reconfigured human society to end its role as ecological destructor. What we need is a philosophy that imagines human social systems taking on new roles as ecological stewards. We can find the roots of this truly practical ecological philosophy in pre-capitalist, Indigenous thought.

RADICAL INDIGENOUS ECOLOGY

If capitalism truly is the necessary development before communism, it would seem to be folly to search for progressive ideologies in pre-capitalist societies. Folly-er still to try and apply those romantic ideas to our socialist utopias. Capitalism is a violent but mandatory step towards communism. It has socialized production and brought us workers together, revolution-prone in our dispossession and hopelessness. Or at least, this is the story teleological, vulgar Marxism tells us. But the truth of the matter is that there still remain philosophies from pre-capitalist societies that can be downright revolutionary. 

In the essay “Karl Marx and Radical Indigenous Critiques of Capitalism”, Nodrada summarizes the Indigenous relationship to capitalism by stating,

[The] humanist, or perhaps more accurately life-affirming, ethic remains at the heart of Indigenous communities and their identities as specifically distinct from the mainstream of Western bourgeois society. They are not apart from it, as after all colonization was and is itself a capitalist encroachment and domination. The global system of our world is capitalism, this is a fact.

Insofar as they are not assimilated — that is, insofar as they are Indigenous, as long as they remain in continuous ties with their ancestral relations and as distinct peoples, capital has not penetrated into and reconstructed their very hearts in its image. Indigenous identities are community identity, and their coherence depends on principles alien to that of capitalist identities. Indigenous peoples have successfully resisted the debilitating capitalization of their subjectivities for 500 years and counting. [Leanne Betasamosake] Simpson and other Indigenous critics of capital recognize that it represents a quasi-autonomous, impersonal power which corrodes all community-based ways of life in the name of its vampiric drives.

Indigenous relations to global capital today can be characterized through Marx’s own distinction between formal and real subsumption to capital. Indigenous communities, by their life-affirming modes of existence and resistant autonomy against capitalist instrumental reason, have not been thoroughly penetrated by the real subsumption of capital. The real penetration means total transformation of a way of living and laboring with capital at its center, and thus far from Indigenous ethics or ways of thinking and being.8 (emphasis added)

Whether the existence of innately anti-capitalist “life-affirming modes” among broadly defined “Indigenous” peoples is to be read as a cultural or productive resistance to capitalist subsumption (surely the former, in the United States for example, reservations are still of course class societies), the point still stands for our purposes here. This resistance to the real subsumption of capital manifests itself in a fascinating series of connected ecological philosophies that put shame to the red-green debates of modern Marxism.

One such philosophy is that of grounded normativity, a way of being that recognizes the inherent relationship of people and societies to place. It blurs the subject-object divide while still recognizing the responsibility we all have in our unique situation among our broader ecology. Glen Sean Coulthard in his work Red Skin, White Masks, writes,

Stated bluntly, the theory and practice of Indigenous anticolonialism, including Indigenous anticapitalism, is best understood as a struggle primarily inspired by and oriented around the question of land— a struggle not only for land in the material sense, but also deeply informed by what the land as system of reciprocal relations and obligations can teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and the natural world in nondominating and nonexploitative terms—and less around our emergent status as “rightless proletarians.” I call this place-based foundation of Indigenous decolonial thought and practice grounded normativity, by  which I mean the modalities of Indigenous land-connected practices and longstanding experiential knowledge that inform and structure our ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with human and nonhuman others over time.9

Again, Coulthard, with co-author Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, continues elsewhere,

What we are calling “grounded normativity” refers to the ethical frameworks provided by these Indigenous place-based practices and associated forms of knowledge. Grounded normativity houses and reproduces the practices and procedures, based on deep reciprocity, that are inherently informed by an intimate relationship to place. Grounded normativity teaches us how to live our lives in relation to other people and nonhuman life forms in a profoundly nonauthoritarian, nondominating, nonexploitive manner. Grounded normativity teaches us how to be in respectful diplomatic relationships with other Indigenous and non-Indigenous nations with whom we might share territorial responsibilities or common political or economic interests. Our relationship to the land itself generates the processes, practices, and knowledges that inform our political systems, and through which we practice solidarity. To willfully abandon them would amount to a form of auto-genocide.10

The point for us to understand here is that our very existence in a specific set of environmental circumstances informs our actions. We act in accordance with our productive mode, but without the practical experience that we gain from our grounded place within a broad set of relations (environmental, geographical, social, etc.), we lose all ability to orient ourselves and our actions. Any kind of overarching, one-size-fits-all approach to ecology loses all meaning beyond this – all philosophies and metaphysics must be able to rapidly react to their environment. In this way, it is not enough to label the ecological problem with capitalism a problem of the metabolic rift it creates. Capitalism affects different systems in different ways. Its effects must be understood by first orienting ourselves in a given environment. 

By this method of grounding in a broad, ecological web, a subject can begin to classify its actions as harmonious and disharmonious. 

There are those that are harmonic with the way of all living things, and there are those that are disharmonic. A square is machine-like, is rigid and without a smooth, rhythmic flow. It is riven in different directions, it is centrifugal. A circle is a oneness which encompasses all directions in a centripetal force, a harmony. Marx came somewhat close to this in speaking of capital’s disharmonic metabolism with nature, and of the need for human beings to rationally regulate their engagement with nature as natural beings. This, however, is a fuller expression from within an “animistic” standpoint.

To become harmonic with the rhythm of all living things does not mean returning to a static natural order, but a rational and balanced intercourse with other beings. To become disharmonic harms all living beings in the webs or networks of life, including human beings. Marx’s concept of the human subject as the subjectivity of nature is on the way to this Indigenous knowledge — but he lacked a full expression of the independent liveliness of other living beings. Nevertheless, that he recognized and began to follow this thread is important.11

Only a philosophy of ecology that orients itself to the specificity of its surroundings is one that is useful in practical applications. By modeling the subject in its environment in the decision making process (what are the effects of any given action not just on, say, one human social system, but on the ecological web of relations it exists within), the subject-object divide blurs. We are left with a recognition of ourselves and our social systems as one part of a much broader web of life – systems within systems that interact in countless ways. But of course, it is the experiential knowledge that comes along with such a place-based approach that allows for the subject to not disappear entirely. Agency still matters, but it is the recognition of the equalized relation between, say, a human productive mode and its broader ecology that gives that agency a sustainable purpose.

Capitalism finds itself unable to ground itself in this way. It abstracts time and space, putting the entirety of our social systems and our ecology to work producing as much value in as little time as possible. Andreas Malm, in his work Fossil Capital, has correctly identified the sudden and costly switch from renewable wind and water powered mills to coal powered mills in the early 19th century British textile industry as a manifestation of this spatial and temporal abstraction. The specificity of place required to build a renewable mill (by a powerful river, on a windy moor) did not allow for the abstract conditions required by capital to fully discipline labor. It required a source of energy and could be imported anywhere, to the center of cities humming with proles, to fully come into its own. It required fossil fuels.

Abstract space and abstract time together form what Noel Castree calls the ‘distinctive spatio-temporality’ of the capitalist mode of production. Capital does not circulate in space and through time, as if the two were fixed axes along which it develops; rather, it produces its own abstract space-time. The one dimension is inseparable from the other. They constitute a single spatiotemporality, which emanates straight from the fundamentals of capitalist property relations. A primordial rift in the relation between humans and between them and the rest of nature – the separation between direct producers and means of production – is propagated in space and time, severing human beings from the qualitative properties of both dimensions. Labour is relocated to particular places and moments set aside strictly for the purpose.12

This blatant disregard for the specificity of place and the relation human societies have to their environments, this drive to appropriate all things towards the needs of capital, has of course had massively disharmonious effects. When we ignore the intricacies of the ecological webs our productive modes exist within, we lose the ability to concretely plan. This is the main pitfall of many anti-capitalist agricultural techniques, for example. Permaculture theorists, for example, fail to place themselves within a given social system both quantitatively and qualitatively: quantitatively because they claim to be able to provide for the needs of billions by outlawing “monocropping” of cereal grains (a “solution” to the disasters of capitalist agriculture that would surely kill billions)13 and qualitatively because they fail to recognize the inability of capitalism to engage in agriculture in anyway other than its most profitable incarnation.

Grounded normativity and other philosophies like it seek to abolish this abstract understanding of our ecology and place us firmly in a given place in a given time with an informed sense of agency. By now, the political implications of this thought should be coming clear, but we shall outline what it means for us on the left below.

THE POLITICS AND CYBERNETICS OF ECOLOGY

Any political strategy worth its salt must first and foremost be able to ground itself in its circumstances. To summarize, any organization we create, whether that be commune, mass party or otherwise, must be able to

  1. Self-organize, and
  2. Respond dynamically to environmental perturbations.

These two criteria are intrinsically linked, as autonomous self-organization is the best way for a system to respond quickly to threats and changes to its environment. Leaving a further expansion of the first criteria for a future essay, let’s focus on the second. 

Oftentimes, when we are presented with a political strategy on the left, it lacks the self-awareness needed to properly situate itself in its actual conditions. The recent reascension to popularity of the merger formula is a prime example of this. Instead of recognizing that the conditions that made the merger formula “successful” in the heyday of the SPD no longer exist, strategy-of-patience-heads more or less bend reality to represent what they want it to. The workers’ movement is at a historically low ebb, and serious questions remain about the plausibility of rebuilding it to a point necessary for the socialist movement to even be able to merge with it in the first place.

Viv Soni, in his essay “High Priests of Telescopes and Cyclotrons”, draws on Hilary Putnam and Imre Lakatos by categorizing research programs such as left political strategizing into progressive and degenerating programs. 

Where theory leads to the discovery of novel facts in [progressive research programmes], the degenerating research programme is characterized by the fabrication of theories in order to accommodate known facts… A research programme is progressing as long as its theoretical growth anticipates its empirical growth. It is stagnating if its theoretical growth lags behind its empirical growth (providing only post hoc explanations of chance discoveries).14

This framework is immensely useful when applied to political strategizing. Soni goes on to argue that the modern incarnations of the merger formula fall into the category of degenerating research program, stating that,

In short, the workers’ movement has become a hollowed out container, despite its foundational status within the Strategy of Patience/Merger formula. Although the workers’ movement itself has not been eternised as a permanent entity, the category itself has become more assumed than explained. In other words, the line of argumentation is that the workers’ movement was the vehicle of socialist power once, and therefore it must be again. The question then, is can it be, given the conditions that gave rise to it are so different to those that exist now? The failure to address this point is the root of the degeneration of the Strategy of Patience/Merger formula as a scientific research programme.15

Soni gives a similar treatment to the various attempts to strategize commune building on the left, specifically Joshua Clover’s theory of the riot. For Soni, the promise that the working class is building towards the inevitable commune as an organizational form is one that has no explanatory power, and thus constitutes a degenerated research project. For our purposes, however, it is enough to state that, like the majority of left wing political strategies, the collapse into programmatic degeneration of the merger formula and the strategy of the riot constitute a lack of theoretical grounding in the world as it is. We cannot fall back on whatever past strategy we feel an aesthetic appreciation for. We must be able to build organizations that map onto our various localities. Anyone who has ever seen the sad sight of the lone local member of a Trotskyist sect attempting to flog newspapers to confused pensioners leaving an Aldi will have a recognition of what happens when you fail to map your actions to your terrain. 

Phil Neel, in his work Hinterland, gives several examples of organizations that have been able to successfully map their terrains and act accordingly, attracting support in the process. In explaining the moderate success had by American far-right groups such as the Oath Keepers or the Patriot Movement in the economic hinterlands of the United States, Neel emphasizes their role in disaster zones such as communities struck by wildfires. Their ability to offer “systems of control” in chaotic environments by leading disaster preparedness courses or organizing wide ranging relief efforts causes them to stand out.

By providing material incentives that guarantee stability, combined with threats of coercion for those who oppose them, such groups become capable of making the population complicit in their rise, regardless of ideological positions. In fact, [Australian military strategist David] Kilcullen points out that in such situations… support for one faction or another simply does not follow ideology. People don’t throw their weight behind those they agree with, and often many in a population can’t be said to have any deep-seated ideological commitment in the first place. Instead, support follows strength, and ideology follows support. Political or religious attachment is often an after-the-fact development, preceded by the capable intervention of a pragmatic, functional partisan group that begins as a small minority of the population.16 (emphasis added)

Putting aside the obvious flaw in this strategy that does not allow it to be fully adopted by the left (namely, coercion of a population), there are lessons to be learned. If what makes a population set attracted to a political movement is not necessarily the movement’s ideology but its actions, then the movement that is able to situate itself in its terrain and act accordingly will be rewarded with support. 

The woes of the working class are many, and any political strategy that wishes to organize the disillusionment that accompanies these problems must be able to adequately respond to them. It sounds simple when we put it like that, but most strategy proposals we see today take working class support for granted. It’s assumed that because we have the theory to back up what we say and because it is getting more and more obvious everyday how capitalism is ruining the planet that support will come naturally. But this is not the case.

Support only comes when a political system is able to not only demonstrate an adequate understanding of its operational environment, but demonstrate that its metasystem is able to properly interpret this environment and that its operational wings can materially change things for the better. We are suggesting something like John Boyd’s OODA loop17 or a model like Stafford Beer’s VSM. Parallels can be drawn between correctly situating a system in its operational environment and the specific type of agency taught to us by grounded normativity. Indigenous thought and Stafford Beer alike would have us recognize that the environment of a system is just as important to study as the system itself. Without situating our political systems or even our future communist planning systems in their correct place in the web of relations that makes up their social and ecological spheres of activity, we are doomed to build unviable systems.

The most important first step in the process of building actually successful contemporary left-wing organizations is the analysis of the world as it is around us. It is a necessity to engage in a rigorous, non-sectarian study of capitalism in order to place us within its decline. These parameters will dictate what it is we are actually able to do, instead of what it is we wish the working class would do. What can we do now as opposed to what worked at the height of the workers’ movement?

All actions must be weighed against their systemic background and considered to be either in harmony with the complicated totality of the social and ecological whole, or in disharmony. Definitions for “harmony” and “disharmony” need to be set as well – what level of disharmony are we able to accept for any given action? It is not that humans should relinquish all responsibility and just “let the environment do its thing man” – we are as much a part of that environment as anything else, and our inaction has serious consequences. Our actions as stewards of our ecology are vitally important. Likewise, it is not that we should, on one hand, dictate demands to an unruly working class like a bunch of Stalinists, nor on the other hand just let the working class spontaneously find its own way to communism. Our actions as organizers, agitators and nogoodniks should be the actions of stewards. 

If we can impart any advice onto the reader, let it be this: read less of the Marxian cannon apart from Marx himself and read more systems theory, ecology and radical Indigenous thought. It’s there that you’ll find the seeds of an emancipated world.

REFERENCES

  1. In true black mold fashion. ↩︎
  2. Karl Marx (1867). Capital Volume 1. Online: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ ↩︎
  3. One possible scenario for utilizing animal waste in modern agriculture is ley farming. For further reading on the topic of how we can ecologically produce staple cereal crops at scale using ley techniques see “Role of ley pastures in tomorrow’s cropping systems. A review” (2020) by G. Martin, et al. in Agronomy for Sustainable Development. Online: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13593-020-00620-9 ↩︎
  4. Karl Marx (1867). Capital Volume 1. Online: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ ↩︎
  5. Ibid. ↩︎
  6. Murray Bookchin (1982). The Ecology of Freedom. Online:
    https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-the-ecology-of-freedom ↩︎
  7. Jason W. Moore (2015). Capitalism in the Web of Life.  ↩︎
  8. Nodrada (2022). “Karl Marx and Radical Indigenous Critiques of Capitalism”. Online:
    https://nodrivers.medium.com/karl-marx-and-radical-Indigenous-critiques-of-capitalism-fd27169c357 ↩︎
  9. Glen Sean Coulthard (2014). Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition.  ↩︎
  10. Glen Coulthard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2016). “Grounded Normativity / Place-Based Solidarity” in American Quarterly. Online:
    https://www.jstor.org/stable/26359594 ↩︎
  11. Nodrada (2022). “Karl Marx and Radical Indigenous Critiques of Capitalism”. Online:
    https://nodrivers.medium.com/karl-marx-and-radical-Indigenous-critiques-of-capitalism-fd27169c357 ↩︎
  12. Andreas Malm (2013). “The Origins of Fossil Capital: From Water to Steam in the British Cotton Industry” in Historical Materialism vol. 21, issue 1. Online:
    https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/21/1/article-p15_2.xml ↩︎
  13. See reference note 3 above. ↩︎
  14. Viv Soni (2024). “High priests of telescopes and cyclotrons: Marxism and revolutionary strategy as science” in The Black Lamp (also republished under the same title by black mold). Online:
    https://www.black-lamp.com/posts/high-priests-of-telescopes-and-cyclotrons-marxism-and-revolutionary-strategy-as-science ↩︎
  15. Ibid. ↩︎
  16. Phil A. Neel (2018). Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict. ↩︎
  17. Only less fascist. OODA loop is an acronym for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. ↩︎