Charting a Communal-Ecological Path: Beyond the Growth Fetish

For ecosocialism to be polarized between ecomodernism and degrowth, both of these would, by definition, need to be dominant poles within ecosocialism, which is not the case. Whatever its ecological pretensions, ecomodernism is more of an antagonist to ecosocialism than a pole within it—unless perhaps the term “ecosocialism” is broadened to include any social-democratic or socialist discussion of ecological issues (issues that, as Holgersen himself observes, everyone must now discuss in order to be “taken seriously”). As John Bellamy Foster has pointed out, the body of ecological modernization theory undergirding ecomodernism is generally characterized by open hostility to most of the core tenets of the socioecological foundations of critical environmental sociology and other critical perspectives on the ecological crisis, and thus to the basic concepts of ecosocialism. Huber and Phillips’s scorn for, inter alia, Marx’s theory of metabolic rift, mobilization against extractive megaprojects in the Global South, a steady-state economy or other limits to growth, and even classical Marxist critiques of imperialism going back to V. I. Lenin would seem to remove them from the ecological discussion.³ To put the matter bluntly, the “eco-” prefix on “ecomodernism” seems to be more marketing than substance—an attempt to repackage discredited theories of modernization and neoclassical economics in green wrapping and import them into the realm of ecology and ecological politics.

Far from a subdiscipline within Marxism (itself hardly an academic discipline), ecological Marxism generally refers to a careful reexamination of Marx and Frederick Engels’s thought and the movements that have built on it, with a focus on the ecological implications and insights prompted by the tradition’s materialist and dialectical project of human emancipation. One of the initial accomplishments of figures such as Foster, Paul Burkett, Brett Clark, and others was to refute the widespread perception of a deeply ingrained hostility to ecology inherent in Marx and Marxism. Here they demonstrated the productivist interpretation as largely a consequence of Eurocentrism and the rejection of the dialectics of nature—or a materialist dialectic rooted in nature—on the part of Western Marxism, and the ossification and closed systematization of the dialectics of nature in Soviet Marxism under Joseph Stalin.⁴ As Burkett in particular thoroughly demonstrated, the consistent concern of Marxism from the outset has not been modernization in the sense that it is used in ecomodernism to argue that technology, quite apart from social relations, can solve all ecological problems within the boundaries of capitalism. Rather the self-emancipation of humanity, so that every social individual may jointly pursue sustainable human development, was always at the heart of Marx’s vision.⁵

A notable feature of both Saito’s and Huber and Phillips’s arguments is the attempt to find in Marx either a categorical condemnation of capital as an exclusively destructive force, or unqualified endorsement of it as a purely progressive one, respectively, which is a particularly undialectical way to approach his thought, and thus bound to lead to fruitless polarizations. This is not because Marx was inconsistent, erratic, or prone to epistemological ruptures and dramatic reversals, but because his dialectical approach recognizes in capital both a constructive and destructive aspect, a positive and a negative, a progressive and a regressive moment, though the relative weight of these two moments is not fixed. Compounding this complexity inherent to the dialectical process is the fact that the chief objective of Marx’s analysis was not categorical moral judgments—though his condemnation of the moral hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie is difficult to miss—but a careful tracing of the contradictions constitutive of capitalist society and its evolution, so as to find what Lefebvre refers to as the “opening, the way of escape” from terrorist society and social domination.⁶

Despite his flawed framing of the problematic, Holgersen is nonetheless correct that the problem of growth, and its antithesis in degrowth, is a vital issue confronting ecosocialism. As Lefebvre explains, growth in the mid-twentieth century (between 1950 and 1970) developed as an ideology that sought to mask the brutal realities and historical consequences of the more appropriate and Marxist category of “enlarged accumulation” associated with capital’s alienated and constitutionally uncontrollable mode of regulating humanity’s social metabolism.⁷ This ideology, wedded to productivism and economism, conflated mathematical and economic growth and posited it as both means and end. It was at this point that growth was proclaimed to be the cure to all the ills of uneven and systemic underdevelopment in the Global South, social polarization and poverty, and the rising discontent that exploded at the end of the 1960s. Mészáros adds that this ideology and perversion of growth as an end is impelled by a “fetishism of quantification” that “completely dominates the qualitative dimension of the reproduction process.”⁸

Lefebvre observes that at the point that growth becomes an ideology, “destruction becomes inherent in capitalism, in every respect. This destruction does not only consist of declared violence (both the civil and the military kind). An obsolescence of objects is organised on all sides, that is to say, the lifespan of objects and industrial products is wilfully curtailed.”⁹ Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy take up this same issue and course of development of the capitalist system with the concept of monopoly capital, and demonstrate how it leads to vast amounts of waste embedded in commodities and a virulent intensification of militarism and U.S. imperialism.¹⁰ The transition of the capitalist system into what Mészáros describes as its structural crisis has only intensified this problem, as increasing volumes of waste are needed to mitigate problems of overaccumulation and prevent the potential abundance made possible by the unprecedented development of the productive forces in the twentieth century from undermining the scarcity rationale. This rationale is that on which the logic of class domination is premised, and the proliferation of excess productive capacity is just one of numerous manifestations of the structural crisis, which ultimately “reveals itself as a veritable crisis of domination in general.”¹¹ Indeed, under neoliberalism the aforementioned fetishism of quantity and the ideology of growth that rests on it has come to dominate labor associated with care, education, and scholarship, to the detriment of quality in all these sectors, while the quantity of waste has become increasingly deadly for growing segments of the world population.¹² The upshot of this is that “we have historically moved from capital’s reproductive practices of ‘productive destruction’ to a stage where the predominant feature is increasingly and incurably that of destructive production” in which the value that capital associates with utility is in reality “anti-value” with respect to human needs.¹³

This proliferation of anti-value results from the manner in which “the primary determinations of the capital system are oriented, in a perversely upside-down way, toward the self-expansion of capital, and only coincidentally towards the growth of use-values corresponding to genuine human need.”¹⁴ This has dire consequences on both the “economic plane,” where “the imperative of growth, which must be pursued even when it takes the form of cancerous growth, leads to a complete disregard for safeguarding the elementary conditions of human existence,” and on the “political and military plane,” where the “drive toward monopolistic domination can never fully succeed in its global aspirations,” leading to a situation where the United States is increasingly pushing the world to the brink of a thermonuclear holocaust. This is all in addition to undertaking multiple regional bloody military adventures and other forms of violent domination in a desperate attempt to achieve “global hegemonic imperialism.”¹⁵

Thus, the challenge facing the ecosocialist project in the twenty-first century is unprecedented in both the scope of the required metabolic transformation, which entails the elimination of all forms of hierarchical domination, and the urgency with which it must be carried out, owing to both the ecological and geopolitical crises that the capitalist system’s antagonistic structure can only exacerbate in the broader context of the deepening structural crisis of the entire system.¹⁶ To describe this challenge as daunting would be an understatement, yet the necessity of a hegemonic socialist alternative to capital’s form of metabolic control is in no way diminished by the immense difficulties it faces. Rather, as Mészáros emphasizes, subjective and objective conditions will continue deteriorating to the point of becoming intolerable for increasingly large proportions of the world population, thereby ensuring that “the historical actuality of the socialist offensive—as synonymous with the end of the system of relative improvements through consensual accommodation—is bound to assert itself in the longer run.” Nonetheless, the historical actuality of this socialist offensive faces a major contradiction, namely “the absence of adequate political instruments that could turn this potentiality into a reality.”¹⁷

Certainly, examples of increasingly intolerable conditions abound. The return of Donald Trump and his neofascist project to the White House is one prominent such example with worldwide repercussions.¹⁸ The appalling and comprehensively documented intensification of Israel’s genocide in Palestine, openly abetted by the United States and several European governments and media outlets, is perhaps the most graphic, but far from isolated, instance of the exterminism of contemporary capital and its settler colonial state institutions around the world. Simultaneously, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration reported first the summer of 2023 and later that of 2024 as the hottest summer on record in the northern hemisphere, with the former estimated to be 1.30−1.49 degrees Celsius warmer than the baseline in the late nineteenth century, and the latter 1.40−1.59 degrees, while a group of prominent Earth system scientists announced in 2023 that six of nine planetary boundaries are currently being transgressed—climate change, biosphere integrity, biogeochemical flows, novel entities, land system change, and freshwater change, with all but the last two estimated to be somewhere in the “high risk zone.”¹⁹

Given this dire situation, the growing influence of degrowth and its confrontation with ecosocialism, rather than constituting a “problem,” represents a potentially constructive development. This is particularly the case with the formulation of ecosocialist degrowth—or better, deaccumulation.²⁰ As a negation of the ideology of growth, degrowth represents a potentially radical point of departure from continued subordination of the conditions of human and nonhuman survival to the dictates of capital accumulation. The one-sided domination of quantity over quality has infiltrated virtually all sectors of society and aspects of everyday life. Nonetheless, as Michael Löwy has observed, its chief weakness is that “degrowth in itself is not an alternative economic and social perspective: it does not define what kind of society will replace the present system.”²¹ Degrowth as a simple negation of growth remains entangled within the ideology of growth, because, as Mészáros explains, “the direct negation of various manifestations of alienation is still conditional on what it negates, and therefore remains vulnerable in virtue of that conditionality.”²² In this respect, degrowth is an important negation of growth, but only inasmuch as it pushes forward toward the necessary sublation of growth and its negation into a new, higher form of society.²³ Failing this, as Lefebvre cautions, those who would “willingly smash growth” risk a “return to the archaic and to the dislocation of the social totality by concentrating on the peripheries alone.”

Presaging contemporary polemics, Lefebvre also criticizes socialists who simply stand on the opposite side of the negation, observing that “European socialists and communists simply propose to take over the baton from the bourgeoisie, though they differ on the modalities of achieving growth.” In this way, both ideologies remain constrained by the premises of growth, such that “another way must be found.”²⁴ Mészáros similarly cautions against accepting the premises of the “arbitrary and self-serving alternative between ‘growth or no-growth,'” pointing out that the growth principle that inevitably wins out in such a framing is one that is not only divorced from, but stands in “potentially most devastating and destructive counter-position to human need.”²⁵ In the same vein, Lefebvre observes that “contemporary experience shows us only too well that there can be economic and technological growth without real social development, without the enrichment of social relations. In social practice, this gives rise to only a mutilated movement, which leaves stagnant numerous sectors of social reality: the life of politics, ideology, culture, and aesthetics.”²⁶

The Communal Alternative

The alternative toward which both Lefebvre and Mészáros converge, albeit with differing yet complementary emphases and terminology, is to move beyond the impasse between growth and its one-sided negation. This is in many ways captured in the contemporary conception of “the commune as a socialist building block,” or more simply the “communal system.”²⁷ Whereas Mészáros, drawing directly from Marx, openly posits the communal system as the necessary hegemonic socialist alternative to the capitalist system, Lefebvre advocates the project of generalized autogestion, often translated as self-management, but taking on a deeper and more universal meaning more akin to grassroots control or communal self-determination in Lefebvre’s theorization.²⁸ As in Mészáros’s theorization of self-management and the communal system, Lefebvre draws his theorization of autogestion from Marx, as well as from the Paris Commune itself, the 1917 Revolution, and the anticolonial struggle in Algeria. Furthermore, the convergence between Mészáros and Lefebvre on the communal system and autogestion is guided by the shared strategic problematic driving their thinking—the withering of the state—which opposes both statism and a voluntarist abolition of the state by decree. Both thinkers are unequivocal on this point and its centrality to the Marxist project more broadly. In a paper on the topic, Lefebvre declares:

If ever it were proven that the State could not be made to wither away, that the State is destined to prosper and to flourish until the end of time, then Marxism as a whole would have to jump ship. The dialectic would have no more meaning, for the revolutionary dialectic of Marx and Lenin is just that. If it were true, the socialist revolution would capitulate in the face of democracy. The whole of Marxism would eventually collapse.²⁹

Mészáros also situates the withering away of the state at the center of Marx’s project, contending that, “those who deny his unending conviction regarding the necessary withering away of the state as such, from the time of his early critique of the state, are, knowingly or not, in complete disagreement not only with this one aspect of his conception but with the whole of it.”³⁰

As Chris Gilbert observes, the conditions that Mészáros stipulates as necessary to the withering away of the state, “the appropriation of production by workers, all controlling functions exercised by associated producers, and the reintegration of administrative functions into the community,” directly point to the communal system, as well as, I would contend, to autogestion.³¹ Mészáros himself emphasizes the centrality of self-management—one key aspect of autogestion—to the communal system when he maintains that:

The communal type production and exchange of activities envisaged by Marx—in which “instead of a division of labour” (which must be tyrannically predetermined by the projected material targets) a “planned organization of labour” (planned in accord with the needs and aspirations of the working subjects concerned) is the operative principle—can only be brought into existence by the individuals concerned. For they are the ones who are called upon to produce and exercise their own work-skills, to the full of their abilities, within the setting of a properly mediated and coordinated societal self-management.³²

The further insight that Lefebvre’s thought on autogestion offers into Mészáros’s account of the communal system here is twofold. First, it helps to throw some of the challenges facing the communal system into sharper relief, in keeping with Mészáros’s admonition that “the orienting principles cannot simply proclaim (in the form of a categorical negation) the envisaged future conditions of communal production and consumption as the ideal counter-image of the present, however acute the contradictions and crisis symptoms of the latter.”³³

Gilbert notes that in Venezuela’s case, “when [Hugo] Chávez launched the idea of making communes in 2009, though there were some notable exceptions, the project generally got little traction in the masses.”³⁴ It was not until Venezuela faced the combination of a severe economic crisis and constant imperial attack, with the government of Nicolás Maduro seeming to move toward capitalist restoration, that communal projects began proliferating around the country as both a means to cope with the loss of support from the state and a way to restore Chavismo. This is consistent with Lefebvre’s observation that “experience (social practice) shows, in our opinion, that management associations—in their simplest and most interesting form, namely autogestion—appear in the weak points of existing society.”³⁵ This is also supported by struggles for territorial autonomy by Indigenous groups and other communitarian revolutionary subjects in Mexico and other parts of Latin America, which have likewise tended to occur at “weak points.”³⁶

This suggests that autogestion is a phenomenon that tends to emerge at the periphery, a category to which Lefebvre assigns four senses: (1) “the so-called underdeveloped countries, particularly the ex-colonial ones, but also and in a wider sense the world proletariat”; (2) “the regions which are distant from the centres within the capitalist countries themselves”; (3) “the urban peripheries—the inhabitants of the suburbs, immigrant workers in the bidonvilles, etc.”; and (4) “the social and political peripheries—particularly youth and women, homosexuals, the desperate, the ‘mad,’ the drugtakers.”³⁷ The emergence of autogestion at any such place at any time carries with it the possibility of the radicalization and generalization of the practice into a transformative project, which in turn “heralds a process which passes through the open breach and may extend to society as a whole.”³⁸ This possibility is also a necessity, because “for autogestion to be consolidated and expanded, it has to occupy the strong points of a social structure that constantly bridle against it. From a privileged sector, it must become the whole, the globality, a ‘system.'” That is, autogestion cannot remain on the periphery and remain viable, both because the capitalist system that surrounds it has considerable resources with which to crush any such project, and because “society constitutes a whole and does not consist of a sum of elementary units,” such that, “even radicalized, an autogestion that only organized itself into partial unities, without achieving globality [le global], would be destined to failure.”³⁹ In a similar sense, Mészáros contends that one of the main tenets of Marx’s political theory is that “the successful social revolution cannot be local or national—only political revolutions can confine themselves to a limited setting, in keeping with their own partiality—it must be global/universal, which implies the necessary transcendence of the state on a global scale.”⁴⁰

This necessity of transcending the state on a global scale reinforces the withering away of the state, which “calls the State into question as a constraining force erected above society as a whole, capturing and demanding the rationality that is inherent to social relations (to social practice).” Autogestion, backed up by global necessity, therefore “tends to engender the State’s withering away.”⁴¹ This inevitably leads autogestion into a “collision” with the state, confronting the former with a “brutal obligation: to constitute itself as a power which is not that of the State.”⁴² Without denying the necessity or importance of political revolution, or of utilizing the revolutionary state, Mészáros emphasizes that this obligation continues to apply in a postrevolutionary context. While, as he argues, “the capitalist state can be overthrown,” the state as such cannot, and must instead “be totally eradicated and replaced by a qualitatively different modality of truly autonomous overall control of societal decision-making by the people through the qualitative reconstitution of the social metabolism itself,” or else the state and private capitalism can be readily restored.⁴³ This necessity is closely imbricated with the necessity of overcoming the social or vertical division of labor throughout society “through a conscious organization of labour, planned by the active working individuals themselves who reappropriate all those controlling functions which continue to be exercised by the party and the state under the (post-revolutionary) division of labour.”⁴⁴

In Gilbert’s account of the communes in Venezuela, this need to pursue globality and the challenge it poses with respect to the state is currently expressed in the realization that “if Venezuelan communes are not to be merely picturesque refuges but rather a counter-hegemonic system that reaches beyond the local to the national level and even beyond,” and if they are not to be weakened by their isolation to the point of succumbing entirely to capital, they require a coordinating mechanism operating at a higher level, leading to the formation of a Unión Comunera (Communard Union). In words that recall Lefebvre’s brutal obligation, Gilbert observes that “the complication is that this coalescing force should come from below, from the grassroots, yet it must supersede the local.”⁴⁵

Notably, in a 2005 speech at the Third World Conference of Solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution, Michael Lebowitz similarly emphasizes the need to address a “lack of solidarity within the working class as a whole,” or the “separation between the worker-managed enterprises and the rest of society,” and the fact that this is not a problem that can be resolved by the state, as an important lesson that the Venezuelan project can draw from Yugoslavia’s experiments with self-management in the mid-twentieth century.⁴⁶ Like Lebowitz, Lefebvre also maintains that the manner in which the state attempted to implement autogestion as a harmonious system in Yugoslavia was a central error, contending instead that “autogestion reveals contradictions in the State because it is the very trigger of those contradictions,” to the point that the “democratic nature of a State or any other apparatus can be evaluated in terms of its capacity to avoid snuffing out contradictions…. It should not only allow their expression and allow them to take shape but should also directly provoke them.”⁴⁷

Rather than relying on the state to smooth over contradictions, Lefebvre contends that autogestion “implies self-criticism, and a continual effort to alert consciousness both to the relations which exist within the self-managing unit and to the relation between its functional, structural limits and the whole of society.”⁴⁸ Without denying that subordination of the interests of all society to local or partial interests represents one of the largest risks to autogestion, Lefebvre rejects the notion of a dilemma between state centralization and a decentralization that prioritizes the local over the global as “part of the ideology of absolute politics.”⁴⁹ Mészáros makes the same point when he directs attention to the “self-serving” opposition between formal law and moral imperatives with which bourgeois ideology of the state attempts to paper over the nonviability of the imposition of law over the antagonistic constitution of society in a way that tacitly functions on the Thrasymachian principle of “might as right.” “The real opposition that must be firmly asserted is between, on the one hand, law autonomously determined by the freely associated individuals at all levels of their life, from their most immediate productive activities to the highest regulatory requirements of their cultural and overall societal decision-making processes,” Mészáros writes, “and law superimposed over them, on the other.”⁵⁰

In contrast to an alienated decision-making body superimposed on the social individuals by the guardians of the existing order, both Mészáros and Lefebvre advocate a model of active or substantive democracy representing a form of decision-making in which “the social individuals (or associated producers) set the law in relation to themselves, so as to be able to autonomously modify it whenever the changing circumstances of their self-determined social metabolic processes so require.”⁵¹ Just as capital constitutes an alienated organic system—in the sense of second-order mediations that are mutually reinforcing—Mészáros maintains that the socialist alternative must likewise constitute an interlocking system of mutually reinforcing components, though of a less alienated character. Chávez himself emphasized the importance of substantive democracy and its relationship to autogestion in his famous “Golpe de Timón” speech when he quoted Mészáros’s contention that “the yardstick of socialist achievements is the extent to which the adopted measures and policies actively contribute to the constitution and deep-rooted consolidation of a substantively democratic (i.e. in its mode of operation in all spheres truly non-hierarchical) mode of overall social control and self-management.” He went on to contrast “socialism and its absolutely democratic essence” to capitalism, which “has in its essence the anti-democratic, the exclusionary, the imposition of capital and the capitalist elites.”⁵²

Directly tied to the substantive democracy in the form of self-determination and full participation in all relevant decisions that communal autogestion entails is substantive equality, which “is an absolute condition for creating a historically sustainable alternative order.”⁵³ In contrast to the formal equality proclaimed (and systematically violated) by the capitalist state, substantive equality entails “a society in which, on the one hand, work itself is universalized, consciously involving every single individual, and, on the other hand, the potentially most generous fruits of the individuals’ positive dedication to their productive objectives are equitably shared out among all of them.”⁵⁴ This monumental shift, which involves eliminating all forms of hierarchical domination, and not just those unique to capital, needs to supplant the “structural antagonism between capital and labor” that renders the entire social structure adversarial, which thereby necessitates the imposition of various “mechanisms of external control over all recalcitrant forces.”⁵⁵ Substantive equality provides a material basis for society to operate with the “full and equal participation of all its members in the process of decision making at all levels,” which is the only way to progressively free society from the “contradictory and antagonism-reproducing predicament” imposed by the hierarchical division of labor. Precisely because it confronts the basis of the antagonistic structure of society from the micro- to the macro-level, substantive equality also suggests itself as a solution to the problem of potential conflicts between the interests of the individual and society as a whole associated with autogestion. This is particularly so because the direct link between substantive equality and substantive democracy opens the way to the “restitution of the power of decision making to individuals as consciously acting social individuals,” which is “the only possible way to reconstitute the unity of politics and economics, together with the harmonization of the individual and social decision making in a meaningful sense of the term.”⁵⁶ In addition to various technological and other advances, this principle of substantive equality would help to push the communal project to appropriate communes in a “revolutionary way,” rather than a “reactionary way,” on a material basis.⁵⁷

The second manner in which Lefebvre’s theorization of autogestion offers additional insights into Mészáros’s theorization of the communal system is by illuminating the path that the latter offers beyond the ideology of growth in the direction of metabolic restoration.⁵⁸ A fundamental prerequisite of this metabolic restoration is comprehensive and rational planning of all aspects of the social metabolism, which is precluded for multiple reasons by the antagonistic orientation of capitalist production to exchange value and capital accumulation—that is, by the metabolic rift.⁵⁹ As Mészáros observes, “production oriented towards and determined by the exchange of products—be that under capitalism or in postcapitalist societies—is radically incompatible with real planning.”⁶⁰ This incompatibility, moreover, is rendered most dangerous precisely under capital’s irrational mode of social metabolic control, as “no previous mode of social reproduction has ever had an even remotely comparable impact on the vital conditions of existence—including the natural substratum of human life itself.”⁶¹ In contrast to this, “the historically novel character of the communal system defines itself through its practical orientation towards the exchange of activities, and not simply of products,” the allocation of which matches their directly social character in this system.⁶²

Rather than simply negating growth, Lefebvre points out that linking growth back to the qualitative issue of development “tends to interrupt its exponential curve” and restore it as a strategy rather than a necessity.⁶³ Mészáros similarly maintains that communal production entails subordinating growth to “profoundly qualitative considerations,” though this is “absolutely prevented by the unquestioning and unquestionable self-expansionary drive of capital, which is incompatible with the constraining consideration of quality and limits.” Therefore, “a radically different kind of socioeconomic and cultural management is required for a society operated on the basis of such a qualitatively different reproductive metabolism, briefly summed up as self-management.”⁶⁴ In this vein, notes Lefebvre, “the principle of autogestion revives the contradiction between use value and exchange value. It tends to restore primacy to use value. It ‘is’ the use value of human beings in their practical relations. It valorizes them against the world of the commodity,” though without purporting to magically abolish the commodity by decree.⁶⁵ Rather than by decree or magic, the world of the commodity is progressively eradicated by the positive redefinition of social wealth in terms of “disposable time” within the “qualitatively different social metabolic framework” of communal autogestion.⁶⁶

Within such a framework, growth could be pursued where it is needed to satisfy genuine human needs, curtailed where such needs are met, and reversed where the need to retain the conditions for sustainable human development so require. This points to another factor that renders the communal system particularly effective at charting a path beyond growth—namely, that of enjoyment. According to Gilbert, the militants implementing communal projects in Venezuela are bringing “pleasure and de-alienation, along with internal democracy, to the forefront of their vision of socialism.”⁶⁷ This points to the importance of use and enjoyment to the reappropriation of nature and space (and their corresponding expropriation from capitalist domination). These acts of repurposing open the way for a new production of space that is not premised on the destructive domination of nature, as well as the necessary transformation of everyday life that could break with the reproduction of capitalist relations of production.⁶⁸ Indeed, Lefebvre directly links communal life with enjoyment, and contends that the reef on which many communal projects founder is “the absence of an appropriated space.”⁶⁹ This is not least because such a new production of space is, reciprocally, a necessary element of moving through the breaches inevitably opened by capital’s structural crisis so as to turn “fleeting time into enduring space by means of restructuring the powers and institutions of decision-making,” subordinating quantity to use and enjoyment and ensuring that the inroads made against capital are not easily reversible.⁷⁰

Moreover, the extent to which the models of modernization and development imposed on the Global South are premised on the ideology of growth, which is imbricated with the “ideology of strictly technological remedies” to the problems of uneven and underdevelopment, strongly suggests that the communal system offers an alternative that breaks with the premises as well as the consequences of accumulation. In other words, it breaks with “accumulative societies” altogether.⁷¹ In the capitalist world order, technological development and growth continue to be offered to the peripheries as a universal panacea. Meanwhile, appeals to the obvious fact that the adoption of such a model by the more populous countries of the periphery would rapidly overwhelm the finite resources of the biosphere and push virtually all the Earth-system parameters exponentially beyond even their highest levels of risk are weaponized by the core. These appeals insist that potential competitors such as China, India, and Brazil must, in the interests of ecological survival, curb the aspirations of large swathes of their peoples for an improved standard of living and resign themselves to a subordinate position in the global division of labor.⁷² Not surprisingly, popular forces within these countries often rightfully defy such self-serving admonitions by the imperial powers wherever possible, though this compounds the problem of destructive growth at the global level. The principle of enjoyment embedded in the communal system moves beyond this impasse by undermining the ideology of growth, providing an alternative, qualitative basis for the aspirations of development without lapsing into primitivism.

Although often exaggerated, criticisms that degrowth is unlikely to obtain much political purchase, even among sectors of the periphery situated within the overdeveloped capitalist countries, do obtain a degree of validity in this respect precisely because the term itself suggests a mindset that remains within the ideology of growth. This points to the necessity of autogestion and substantive equality as components of an alternative, a rational and sustainable avenue of development ensuring that both the wealth produced and the burdens of curtailing growth (where necessary) are shared equitably. This is the only way to achieve the degree of worldwide cooperation necessary to address the Anthropocene crisis. Indeed, Mészáros maintains that such an approach is a fundamental prerequisite to sustainability, in that the concept “means being really in control of the vital social, economic, and cultural processes through which human beings can not merely survive but can also find fulfillment, in accordance with the designs which they set themselves, instead of being at the mercy of unpredictable natural forces and quasi-natural socioeconomic determinations.”⁷³ Lefebvre’s aforementioned observation regarding the privileged site of the periphery with respect to autogestion is again relevant here, as “social contrasts, intolerable at the periphery of the system, provide the objective conditions for a revolution directed against this currently existing capitalism.”⁷⁴

Some Proposals, Old and New

The general principle undergirding the periphery as the locus with the most favorable objective conditions for revolution is the tendency for a breach to open whenever and wherever the established order “no longer succeeds in delivering the goods that served as its unquestionable justification” (or has consistently failed to deliver said goods, and even has actively expropriated them).⁷⁵ This has historically been the case for majorities in the Global South, as well as among the peripheries of the Global North.⁷⁶ While such breaches create important openings, “only a radical political initiative can move into the breach,” and, as Mészáros points out, one of the difficult contradictions of our time is the absence of such an initiative when it is most urgently needed.⁷⁷ In the context of the neoliberal assault on national sovereignty, it is also perhaps important to emphasize that autogestion must be implemented as much in the economic and cultural spheres, so as to disassociate it from the neoliberal project of nominal political decentralization alongside authoritarian economic concentration, which has fostered a retreat of genuine democracy in the face of “reactionary political forces and depoliticization.”⁷⁸ Careful dialectical assessment of both the concrete progressive and destructive possibilities present in each situation is preferable to a “metaphysical” opposition of the state to civil society, and necessary to pursue the withering away of the former. While communal production, autogestion, and substantive equality do not by themselves constitute a complete strategy, they do provide important components around which such strategies might be formulated and evaluated.

Not least given growth’s continued domination of the social imaginary, a series of three proposals that Lefebvre offered to combat the ideology of growth in the 1970s might be adaptable to the present juncture:

(1) A strategy which would join up the peripheral elements with elements from the disturbed centres, i.e. with those elements from the working class who can free themselves from the ideology of growth.

(2) An orientation of growth towards specifically social needs and no longer towards individual needs. This orientation would imply the progressive limitation of growth and would avoid either breaking with it crudely or prolonging it indefinitely. In addition, the social needs which according to Marx define a socialist mode of production are increasingly urban needs, related not only to production but to the management of space.

(3) A complete and detailed project for the organisation of life and space, with the largest possible role for self-management [autogestion] but at the same time with an awareness that self-management poses as many problems as it solves.⁷⁹

With a neofascist regime currently wreaking havoc in the United States and similar such regimes and movements surfacing elsewhere, the amount of disturbance in the centers, already heightened by the ongoing structural crisis, may be particularly great, creating multiple opportunities to forge such links. With respect to elements of the core that have explicitly broken with the ideology of growth, the encounter between ecosocialism and degrowth, converging on the idea of planned degrowth—or, rather, deaccumulation—may be another point of contact.⁸⁰ This could be particularly effective if joined to a project of delinking in the periphery along the lines of what Samir Amin has proposed. His proposal is particularly helpful in that it sets aside the interminable debates over whether China, Cuba, Venezuela, and other states fit a particular definition of socialism, capitalism, or something else in favor of a strategic focus on fostering autonomous internal development that moves toward a fully socialist transformation. In this respect, the communal-ecological path does not necessarily stand in diametrical opposition to China’s ecological civilization initiative, which indeed may be an important partner in attempts at delinking from the worldwide law of value, even as such a partnership would likely raise several additional contradictions.⁸¹

Given the historical violence with which the core has responded to attempts at national autonomy in the Global South—violence which seems likely to be even more extreme, given the ever more aggressively imperialist direction that the core is moving—any attempt to delink from the demands of global capital accumulation and even begin to move in the direction of communal production, such as what is being pursued in Venezuela, will almost certainly require support from an anti-imperialist movement of unprecedented determination and ferocity within the United States. This must be simultaneously closely linked to popular forces engaged in anticolonial struggle throughout the periphery. Such a movement is also needed to combat further genocide in Palestine, continued pursuit of a New Cold War with China, and numerous other instances of exterminism. The bold example of student demonstrations across campuses in the United States (and elsewhere) against genocide in Palestine indicates that the possibility of such a movement exists, while the drastic action that the U.S. government has taken against student activists underlines the extremely difficult political situation in the country. Nonetheless, the manner in which the neofascist-neoliberal alliance is also acting to defend fossil capital renders more evident the objective necessity of a much-needed convergence between peace and ecological movements in the interests of human survival everywhere, opening the way for a joint anti-imperialist and ecological rebellion.⁸²

A potential mobilizing category here is that of the environmental proletariat that Foster, Clark, and Richard York have proposed, and which has been subsequently refined to indicate the united “revolt against the capitalist expropriation of nature and the exploitation of labor, thereby uniting the struggles over the economy and the earth.”⁸³ The lead elements of this proletariat include Indigenous movements, both in the core and periphery; peasants; the vast army of unemployed and informal workers; people oppressed on the basis of race and gender; and all others facing exploitation, expropriation, and extermination. In addition to situating the primary front lines of struggle within the Global South without neglecting the importance of the Global North, this category emphasizes the objective grounds that exist for a joint struggle against a common enemy.

The orientation of growth to social needs is an inherent aspect of the communal system that, by definition, invokes the principle of substantive equality. As Mészáros contends, “the actual realization of the society of abundance requires the reorientation of the social reproductive process in such a way that the communally produced goods and services can be fully shared, and not individualistically wasted, by all those who participate in directly social production and consumption.”⁸⁴ In addition to pointing toward a reconceptualization and socialization of wealth (with disposable time displacing abstract value), this leads into immediate demands for public transportation, preventative and restorative health services, education, mental health support, green spaces and gardens, and other services and commons that would enhance and restore public wealth, as well as for increased disposable time now (including that time necessary to mobilize to change society). Such restoration of the commons could serve as an additional rallying point that brings together the interests of the environmental proletariat. It also points to a program of strategic reforms that could be developed. These would be aimed at reversing capital’s assault on public wealth and preparing the conditions for political revolution, along the lines of what Lefebvre proposed as “an ensemble of reforms which have a global aim and result: the dispossession of the ruling class and the removal from it of the means of production and management, direct or otherwise, of the affairs of society as a whole with each demand part of a strategy intended to expropriate capital of the means of production.”⁸⁵ Here Lefebvre’s adage of “demander l’impossible pour avoir tout le possible” (“demand the impossible in order to get all that is possible”) suggests itself as the guiding principle: the more that a mass movement demands the impossible from the current system, the more the movement strengthens and prepares itself to make those demands not only possible, but actual.⁸⁶

The third proposal, to organize life and space around autogestion, raises the question of how the communal system might be pursued in various geographical and social contexts, as well as in different aspects of everyday life, while moving toward totality. Chávez himself emphasized the importance of linking autogestion to the production of space in his aforementioned “Golpe de Timón” speech when he cautioned that “we need to territorialize the models.… Now, partners and comrades, if this element does not form part of a systematic plan, of creation of the new, as a network…as a giant spiderweb covering the territory with the new, if it is not done like this, [the construction of socialism] will be condemned to failure; it will be absorbed by the old system, that would eat it—capitalism is a monster, a giant amoeba.”⁸⁷ Lefebvre, in turn, bolsters Chávez’s warnings, and adds that the scale must eventually reach the global, as the production of a new space “must of necessity result from relationships between groups—between classes or fractions of classes—on a world scale.”⁸⁸ Without prescribing fixed forms to be imposed on every locality, this orientation to the reorganization of life and the production of space in the service of autogestion indicates that the struggle does not only entail pursuing autogestion within workplaces and homes (which are possibly the same sites in the case of reproductive labor, be it waged or unwaged), sites of leisure, and sites where necessities are obtained. It also requires the active reconfiguration and reappropriation of space altogether, linking the territorial and social aspects directly.

Indeed, Lefebvre’s theorization of autogestion, Mészáros’s theorization of the communal system, and the idea of metabolic restoration primarily converge on the basis of their shared underlying objective: dealienation and reappropriation by humanity of space, nature, and the other conditions of human existence and development. Such reappropriation involves not only expropriating these conditions from capitalist domination, but fundamentally reorienting the objective to use and enjoyment by each member of society as a social individual tied to both the past and the future, which leads into Marx’s radical conceptualization of sustainability, in which “even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good heads of the household].”⁸⁹ The degree to which autogestion and the communal system move toward the “higher socio-economic formation” that functions according to this principle is both the criterion and the objective of their contribution to the revolutionary process, which necessitates the complete transformation of everyday life. They do not substitute for or offer a complete strategy ready to be implemented, but they do help to orient our thinking toward what needs to be done. As Lefebvre maintains:

Autogestion can be only one element of a political strategy, but it will be the essential element, giving value to the rest, and without which the rest would be worth nothing. The concept of autogestion, today, is the opening toward the possible. It is both the way forward and the endpoint, the force that can bear the colossal load weighing on society, and which can overcome it. It shows the practical way to change life, which remains the watchword, the goal, and the meaning of a revolution.

Only through autogestion can the members of a free association take control over their own life, in such a way that it becomes their work [œuvre]. This is also called appropriation, de-alienation.⁹⁰

Notes

1. ↩ See Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2023); Kohei Saito, Slow Down (London: Astra Publishing House, 2024); Brian M. Napoletano, “Was Karl Marx a Degrowth Communist?,” Monthly Review 76, no. 2 (June 2024): 9–36; Matt Huber and Leigh Phillips, “Kohei Saito’s ‘Start From Scratch’ Degrowth Communism,” Jacobin, March 9, 2024.
2. ↩ Ståle Holgersen, “Growth or Degrowth? Ecosocialism Confronts a False Dichotomy,” Climate & Capitalism, March 26, 2025.
3. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, “The Planetary Rift and the New Human Exemptionalism,” Organization & Environment 25, no. 3 (October 2012): 211–37.
4. ↩ Foster discusses this in his introduction to John Bellamy Foster, The Dialectics of Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2024).
5. ↩ Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Paul Burkett, “Marx’s Vision of Sustainable Human Development,” Monthly Review 57, no. 5 (October 2005): 34–62.
6. ↩ Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1971), 150. Unless otherwise indicated, all emphases are in the original texts.
7. ↩ István Mészáros, Beyond Capital (London: Merlin Press, 1995).
8. ↩ Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 530; Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 352. For Lefebvre, the disjuncture between the quantitative and the qualitative is the primary contradictions in “absolute space.”
9. ↩ Henri Lefebvre, The Survival of Capitalism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976), 109.
10. ↩ Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966).
11. ↩ István Mészáros, The Structural Crisis of Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009); Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 684.
12. ↩ Robert Austin Henry and Bernadete Beserra, “Neoliberalism and Higher Education in Latin America,” Latin American Perspectives 49, no. 3 (May 2022): 3–17; Nancy Fraser, “Contradictions of Capital and Care,” New Left Review 2, no. 100 (July–August 2016): 99–117.
13. ↩ Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 187.
14. ↩ István Mészáros, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008), 384.
15. ↩ Mészáros, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, 385–36.
16. ↩ Mészáros, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, 33–34.
17. ↩ Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 674.
18. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, “Neofascism in the White House,” Monthly Review 68, no. 11 (April 2017): 1–30; Editors, “Notes from the Editors,” Monthly Review 76, no. 8 (January 2025): c2–61.
19. ↩ On summer temperatures, see Jackie McGuinness and Katherine Rohloff, “NASA Clocks July 2023 as Hottest Month on Record Ever Since 1880,” press release, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, August 14, 2023; Peter Jacobs, “NASA Finds Summer 2024 Hottest to Date,” Goddard Institute for Space Studies, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, September 11, 2024. As the values indicate and the latter report notes, the uncertainty range of the temperature estimates within each year is greater than the differences between years. The three boundaries that Katherine Richardson and colleagues report within the “safe operating space” for promoting Holocene conditions, though still “heavily perturbed by human activities,” are stratospheric ozone depletion, atmospheric aerosol loading, and ocean acidification. See Katherine Richardson et al., “Earth beyond Six of Nine Planetary Boundaries,” Science Advances 9, no. 37 (September 2023).
20. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, “Planned Degrowth: Ecosocialism and Sustainable Human Development—An Introduction,” Monthly Review 75, no. 3 (July–August 2023): 1–29.
21. ↩ Michael Löwy, “Nine Theses on Ecosocialist Degrowth,” Monthly Review 75, no. 3 (July–August 2023): 156.
22. ↩ Mészáros, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, 239.
23. ↩ The necessity of this dialectical progression can be found in G. W. F. Hegel’s account of identity and difference being sublated into ground in G. W. F. Hegel, “The Science of Logic,” in G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline (London: Hythloday, 2014)—that is, the “Lesser Logic”—and in greater detail in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2015)—that is, the “Greater Logic”—and is taken up by Marx and Engels on numerous occasions, including notably on the issue of private property.
24. ↩ Lefebvre, The Survival of Capitalism, 118–19.
25. ↩ Mészáros, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, 276–77.
26. ↩ Henri Lefebvre, State, Space, World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2009), 139.
27. ↩ Chris Gilbert, Commune or Nothing!: Venezuela’s Communal Movement and Its Socialist Project (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2023), 12.
28. ↩ See Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden’s introduction to Lefebvre, State, Space, World.
29. ↩ Lefebvre, State, Space, World, 72.
30. ↩ István Mészáros, Beyond Leviathan (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022), 64.
31. ↩ Gilbert, Commune or Nothing!, 99–100.
32. ↩ Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 763.
33. ↩ Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 754.
34. ↩ Gilbert, Commune or Nothing!, 19–20.
35. ↩ Lefebvre, State, Space, World, 144.
36. ↩ David Barkin and Brian M. Napoletano, “The Communitarian Revolutionary Subject and the Possibilities of System Change,” Monthly Review 74, no. 10 (March 2023): 52–64.
37. ↩ Lefebvre, The Survival of Capitalism, 115–16.
38. ↩ Lefebvre, The Survival of Capitalism, 121.
39. ↩ Lefebvre, State, Space, World, 150.
40. ↩ Mészáros, Beyond Leviathan, 398.
41. ↩ Lefebvre, State, Space, World, 147.
42. ↩ Lefebvre, State, Space, World, 147.
43. ↩ Mészáros, Beyond Leviathan, 144.
44. ↩ Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 763.
45. ↩ Gilbert, Commune or Nothing!, 127.
46. ↩ Michael A. Lebowitz, Build It Now (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006), 75.
47. ↩ Lefebvre, State, Space, World, 135.
48. ↩ Lefebvre, The Survival of Capitalism, 122.
49. ↩ Lefebvre, The Survival of Capitalism, 121.
50. ↩ Mészáros, Beyond Leviathan, 171–72.
51. ↩ Mészáros, Beyond Leviathan, 174.
52. ↩ Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 739; Hugo Chávez Frías, “Golpe de Timón” (Caracas: Gobierno Bolivariano, 2012), 10 (author’s translation). English translation: “Strike at the Helm (October 20, 2012),” trans. Jamie Weiss, MR Online, April 1, 2015, mronline.org.
53. ↩ Mészáros, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, 263.
54. ↩ Mészáros, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, 262.
55. ↩ Mészáros, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, 211.
56. ↩ Mészáros, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, 195.
57. ↩ Gilbert, Commune or Nothing!, 32.
58. ↩ Brian M. Napoletano, Brett Clark, John Bellamy Foster, and Pedro S. Urquijo, “Sustainability and Metabolic Revolution in the Works of Henri Lefebvre,” World 1, no. 3 (December 2020): 300–16; Brian M. Napoletano, Pedro S. Urquijo, Brett Clark, and John Bellamy Foster, “Henri Lefebvre’s Conception of Nature-Society in the Revolutionary Project of Autogestion,” Dialogues in Human Geography 13, no. 3 (November 2023): 433–52.
59. ↩ John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, The Robbery of Nature (New York: Monthly Review, 2020).
60. ↩ Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 761.
61. ↩ Mészáros, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, 264.
62. ↩ Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 758.
63. ↩ Henri Lefebvre, Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 133.
64. ↩ Mészáros, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, 280–81.
65. ↩ Lefebvre, State, Space, World, 148.
66. ↩ Mészáros, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, 287.
67. ↩ Gilbert, Commune or Nothing!, 173.
68. ↩ Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life (London: Verso, 2014); Lefebvre, Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment; Napoletano et al., “Henri Lefebvre’s Conception of Nature-Society.”
69. ↩ Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 379.
70. ↩ Mészáros, The Structural Crisis of Capital, 114.
71. ↩ Mészáros, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, 210. The role played by modernization theory here again illustrates the error of positing ecomodernism as a pole of ecosocialism. On accumulative society and its contradictions, see the chapter on “The Theory of Accumulative and Non-Accumulative Processes” in Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life.
72. ↩ Samir Amin, Delinking (London: Zed Books, 1990).
73. ↩ Mészáros, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, 210–11.
74. ↩ Amin, Delinking, ix.
75. ↩ Mészáros, The Structural Crisis of Capital, 112.
76. ↩ Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009); John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Hannah Holleman, “Marx and the Indigenous,” Monthly Review 71, no. 9 (February 2020): 1–19; Nancy Fraser, “From Exploitation to Expropriation,” Economic Geography 94, no. 1 (January 2018): 1–17.
77. ↩ Mészáros, The Structural Crisis of Capital, 112.
78. ↩ Amin, Delinking, 27.
79. ↩ Lefebvre, The Survival of Capitalism, 119.
80. ↩ Foster, “Planned Degrowth.”
81. ↩ On the importance of China’s ecological civilization initiative, see Foster, The Dialectics of Ecology, 158–84; John Bellamy Foster, “Some Preliminary Theses on the Concept of Eco-Civilization,” Monthly Review 76, no. 8 (January 2025): 40–43.
82. ↩ On the need for such an alliance, see the epilogue to John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature (New York: Monthly Review, 2020).
83. ↩ Foster, The Dialectics of Ecology, 238; John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift (New York: Monthly Review, 2010); Brian M. Napoletano, Pedro S. Urquijo, Brett Clark, and John Bellamy Foster, “Identifying the Revolutionary Agent in the Radical Project of Autogestion,” Dialogues in Human Geography 13, no. 3 (November 2023): 468–72.
84. ↩ Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 769.
85. ↩ Lefebvre, The Survival of Capitalism, 125.
86. ↩ Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, “Lost in Transposition,” in Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities (Malden: Blackwell, 1996), 35.
87. ↩ Chávez, “Golpe de Timón,” 16 (author’s translation).
88. ↩ Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 380. Chávez, “Strike at the Helm” (English translation).
89. ↩ Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (New York: Penguin, 1981), 911.
90. ↩ Lefebvre, State, Space, World, 150.