Proletarian Ecology and the Planetary Mode of Production

The globalization of production and its planetary ecological effects suggest we’ve entered an era defined by the planetary mode of production. Such a moment necessitates a planetary subject and theory of historical change, and the core of Marxism provides such a subject in the proletariat. In this article I lay out a theory of “proletarian ecology” that argues Marx’s basic concept of the proletariat was always ecological in the dual sense of a class torn from the ecological conditions of existence (the land) and its historic role in liberating humanity at the planetary scale. I review the traditions of ecological Marxism for their ambivalence if not rejection of the centrality of the labor movement and “working-class self-emancipation” to the Marxist project. I review basic Marxist theories on why the working-class has “objective” (but not automatically organized) power, and discuss some basic contradictions that confront a project to build working-class power toward global ecological transformation. These contradictions sit between Lenin’s more positive vision of how the masses of the working-class can be organized politically and Mike Davis’s more cautionary insights on how proletarian life itself can be pacified via a specific-geography of material and energy-intensive privatism.