(FINAL pre-publication text) We've got it all wrong about capitalism, class, and the climate crisis. Not the facts. Climate change is real, and relentless. Even if it does not spell existential doom-as the masters of mankind have us believe-the conditions of planetary life will change significantly over the next century. They're already changing dramatically. Sea levels are rising. Agricultural productivity has hit a wall. Outdoor workers wilt in the summer heat, and labor productivity-indoors and outdoors-is stagnating. Country-size glaciers calve. Biodiversity suffers. We all know the facts. It's how we make sense of them that shapes our politics. The climate crisis is real, and capitalism is the culprit. And yet, saying so hardly settles things.

Our book is not a guide for what to do, but it is certainly a guide for what to see through. The pathetic tinkering of green capitalism and Malthusian environmentalists at the edges of today’s crises are ones with which we take particular issue. There is no number of Teslas that will solve the climate crisis, nor is there any fantasy of rewilding or bioreactor-based socialism that can swerve around capitalism’s refashioning of the web of life. So we offer these reflections in an era of polycrisis as a warning against the sirens of green capital, and as an indication of the necessity - and the joys - of a feminist, and anti-imperialist, ecosocialism. For it is only through such a program that we can imagine the Capitalocene that we have been given, being remade.

For centuries, the bourgeoisie’s “conceptive ideologists” have delivered a clear message to the dangerous classes (Marx and Engels 2010): “Listen to the science.” It is a central theme in a post-1968 environmentalism defined by such scientism. Even earlier, the science/scientism nexus was paramount. One cannot tell the story of postwar capitalism without addressing the centrality of Good Science in the interwoven history of world power, world accumulation, and world nature. The scientific development of “natural law” has, emphatically since 1945, converted the political problems of monopoly capitalism into techno-scientific “issues.” Not just biological and geophysical problems but also “social” problems were to be “managed” by enlightened technocrats and scientists -- always in the interests of the One Percent.

Raymond Williams a Természetet a nyelv legbonyolultabb szavának nevezte. Én azt mondanám, hogy egyben a legveszélyesebb is, nemcsak az angolban, hanem az összes nyugati nyelvben egyaránt. Természeten mindig a nagybetűs Természetet kell érteni. A nagybetűs Természet egy ideológiai, egyben geokulturális projekt is. Egy imperialista „szoftver” egyik dimenziója, amely eredetileg 1492 után öltött alakot. Hogy mi a célja? Az élet szövedékének irányítása, beleértve az emberi lények életét és munkáját is, a profitmaximalizálás érdekében.

Capitalism in the Web of Life – and the wider world-ecology conversation in which it’s embedded – is a relentless effort to make world-historical sense of capitalism through such a method. Its ontology is the labor process as the active and metabolic relation that makes human sociality, and that it is refashioned and redirected under the bourgeoisie’s class rule. It was first articulated by Marx and Engels in 1840s. Marx amplified those arguments throughout his life, especially in Capital. Their arguments refused Green Arithmetic – adding up Man, Society and Nature – because that method, and reinforces, the real relations of primitive accumulation and capitalism managerialism. It separates in thought the historical separation of the direct producers from the means of livelihood and reproduction. The question of method is for this reason not a trivial matter. The dialectical method is fundamental to the class struggle and the philosophy of praxis on the “real ground of history.”