This article was translated from the French by Stephen Chalk.
The successive heatwaves in my once temperate country of France only have one advantage: they render untenable the stance of those who, like the dull-witted brute strutting about in Washington, stubbornly deny the current deterioration of the global climate, compounded by a rapid collapse in biodiversity.
Having made this alarming observation, many short-sighted environmentalists content themselves with railing against “technology” or, in a no less abstract manner, what they call “productivism.” This then risks fuelling a reactionary vision of the environmental cause. It is our contention, on the contrary, that the ecological struggle will only be capable of tearing humanity free from the environmental black hole, in which it is well on the way to being engulfed, if it is closely allied with rising conscious resistance to capitalist-imperialist exterminationism, which has become incompatible with the very survival of our species’ civilization, and even with the maintenance of any remotely complex life on Earth.
Capitalist exterminationism, environmental catastrophe, and the drive toward globalized wars
In our view, “exterminationism” refers to the ultimate phase of a form of capitalism-imperialism that has reached such a degree of societal decay that, at the environmental, military and sociocultural levels, the pursuit of maximum profit inherent to contemporary capitalism has become objectively suicidal for humanity. This is also evident in the geostrategic and military spheres. As early as the 1980s, Reagan and the global reaction endorsed the idea that, in order get rid of the Soviet Union and the European socialist bloc—which at that time seriously restricted capital’s global predatory dominance—it was perfectly legitimate to threaten Moscow with a full-scale nuclear conflict liable to jeopardize the very existence of humanity. In order to justify the deployment of Pershing missiles in Europe, a fanatical advocate of this exterminationism—which the German reaction summed up with the phrase “better dead than red!” (lieber tot, als rot!)—the anti-philosopher André Glucksmann (father of the highly promising Raphaël Glucksmann) declared at the time in La Force du Vertige [The Force of Vertigo] (Grasset, 1983): “I would rather perish alongside my beloved child in an exchange of Pershings and SS-20s than imagine him dragged off to some global Siberia.” And this scandalous blackmail, then supported by the “social-exterminationist” François Mitterrand (socialist in words, but a fanatical Euro-Atlanticist in deeds!), was not without extremely serious counterrevolutionary political effects, as it contributed to the rise in Moscow of the super-capitulationist Gorbachev. who then adopted Western exterminationism in reverse, giving it the form of so-called “new political thinking.” (“Preferring the universal values of humanity to the class interests of the proletariat”: to put it plainly, liquidating world socialism on the pretext of preserving peace: today’s post-Soviet Russia can now see all too clearly where this supposedly pacifist capitulation has led it!).
Indeed, as Marx and Engels long ago understood, the capitalist system “generates wealth only by sapping its two sources, the Earth and the laborer”. Thus the deadly convergence of the climate crisis, the collapse of biodiversity, and social brutalization combined with rampant fascistization—from Washington to Paris, and from Kiev to Brussels—shows all too clearly that this destructive tendency has crossed a qualitative threshold.
This exterminationist nature is aggravated by Western hegemonism, of which Trump’s United States embodies the salient, with its headlong rush into extractivist solutions, climate change denial and continuous over-armament. Nor is the European Union–NATO to be outdone, since the Merzes, Macrons, and Ursula von der Leyens pride themselves on no longer being afraid of nuclear war (which would necessarily be nuclear and exterminatory were it to break out!) with Moscow, which they ceaselessly provoke by giving nazified Ukraine—“modern” global exterminationism thus rejoins the resurgent old Nazi exterminationism of the Banderite Kiev regime—the military means to attack Russia deep within its territory.
Conversely, the systematic media demonization of the People’s Republic of China conceals the genuine efforts that this country is making in order to articulate industrialization, planning, and environmental policies, notably through the meteoric rise of the photovoltaic sector. This in no way implies that the Chinese model of development is free from contradictions, but no one can deny that China has not withdrawn from the Paris Climate Agreement, unlike the United States, leader of the “free world.” On the contrary, Beijing continues to offer all countries that so wish forms of win-win cooperation accommodating both self-reliant national industrial development and the foundations for a possible energy transition. And let us not forget socialist Cuba, which, before being literally besieged and starved by Trump, was well on the way, under the leadership of Fidel and Raúl Castro, to becoming a global model of alternative ecological development.
Techno-fetishism, consumerism, and the capitalist roots of environmental exterminationism
Some attribute the ecological crisis to “technology” in general, others to the consumerism of the post–Second World War boom years, as though technology and the legitimate pursuit of wellbeing in themselves constituted a problem. However, while in no way denying the way in which contemporary capitalism misdirects the productive forces from within (designed more to supplant the human than to promote it) and perverts patterns of consumption, the fundamental root of the phenomenon lies in the logic of capital, which subordinates technological and productive development to the pursuit of maximum profit, transforming the conquests of science into instruments of private appropriation and destruction of both the Earth and human bodies. And not without also giving rise to an unprecedented and deadly stranglehold by big capital and reactionary forces over the ways in which billions of people, and young people in particular, think, live and express themselves.
It is therefore not technology itself that should be denounced, but the capitalist mode of production which, having reached the imperialist-exterminationist stage, henceforth integrates scientific progress into a dynamic of global plunder, permanent war and systematic placing of workers in competition with each another. The idea of a “green capitalism” is thus an oxymoron: as long as profitability alone guides investment choices, the logic of destruction of the very conditions of life on Earth will prevail over any cosmetic pseudo-regulation.
An age-old dialectic between man and nature
Historically speaking, humanity is immersed in an age-old dialectic in which it was initially dominated by the forces of nature, as evidenced by the ancient pagan nature religions that personified Air, Water, Earth, Lightning, and Fire. Our species then strove to make itself the “lord and master” of nature, to use René Descartes’ brilliant—though not always correctly understood—expression. This aspiration to mastery is not criminal in itself: it expresses the will to develop the productive forces, to free mankind from hunger and from immediate dependence on natural cycles; but it becomes deadly when separated from any awareness of the limits and inherent rhythms of life, subordinating them to the intrinsically inhuman and devitalizing process of expanded reproduction of capital.
Indeed, we have reached an anthropological turning point at which social production must consciously and scientifically take charge of the reproduction of its own environmental conditions of existence, or face global self-destruction. This constitutes a thoroughgoing example of a negation of the negation: culture first “negated” nature, from which it nevertheless originated (for human culture and history result from the long path of consolidation of biological evolution), and this negation in turn has to negate itself in order to reestablish the relation between mankind and nature on new foundations: not by “walking on all fours,” as Voltaire perfidiously accused Rousseau of doing, but through an unprecedented development of science (in which ecology—as distinct from environmentalism—acquires a pre-eminently unifying and coordinating role), and the simultaneous revolutionizing of relations between men, as well as relations between nations, civilizing and putting an end to the savagery and barbarism of these relations in a fundamental manner.
This entails a revolution in the relations between culture and nature: culture is then no longer mere brutal domination, but rationally thoughtful, respectful and organized appropriation of the laws of nature, presupposing the abolition of man’s barbarism over man and of the domination of certain countries over others. Society needs to be purged of what savage, natural, and unthought relations between men it still involves, in order, conversely, to put in place harmonious relations between man and external nature itself.
A new generation of socialism-communism
This kind of conscious taking charge of nature by culture is impossible within the framework of capitalism-imperialism, of which the present exterminationism is the ultimate reality. It calls for a new generation of socialism-communism, articulating advanced science, democratic planning, social ownership of the means of production, unprecedented expansion of democracy, priority given to human needs over profit, and integration of the long path of the dialectics of nature and history into short- and medium-term production and exchange choices. How can one fail to see that a revolution of this kind ultimately requires leadership of society by the class of wage-workers, which implies not only the ousting of the criminal capitalist oligarchy, but also the disputing of the leadership of the ecological transition by the petty bourgeoisie, incapable by its very nature of waging a consistent anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggle (as demonstrated by the hopeless tethering of the French and German Green to the warmongering forces that dominate the European Union).
Communist ecological planning, far from curbing freedom, would broaden its scope by enabling individuals to live with dignity in a preserved environment, rather than compulsively consuming in a devastated world. At the international level, it implies joint planning of democratically and jointly organized production by sovereign countries, freed from the permanent sword of Damocles suspended over them by imperialist interference—particularly in the Global South.
Break with the European Union and reconquest of popular sovereignty
At the national level, France is shackled hand and foot by the European Union’s “free and undistorted competition,” which prohibits any democratically planned industrial, agricultural, or environmental policy. We must break with this prison of nations, which organizes the reduction of workers’ rights to the lowest common denominator, total openness to capital flows, and delivers our productive base to predatory transnational monopolies in the quintessential form of a “war economy,” while turning a blind eye to the ravages of capitalist fishing and agro-industry.
Exiting the European Union, the euro, and NATO is the condition for saving French productive capacity, bringing industry and agriculture back to France, and planning an energy transition that is acceptable in terms of workers’ rights as well as revitalization. This transition implies the reconquest of national and popular sovereignty over economic choices, enabling workers, farmers, technical workers and scientists to decide together how resources are used, instead of being subjected to the dictates of Brussels, Frankfurt, and the big bosses.
The dead ends of NATO-aligned ‘Greenism’
An ecological science turned towards struggle cannot therefore be reconciled with submission to NATO and its militarily and ecologically irresponsible strategy of unlimited confrontation with Russia. What credit can be given to “green” parties that whine day in, day out about climate change while advocating continent-wide military escalation—potentially nuclear—with a major power armed with atomic weapons? What kind of malicious fools can wail against repeated extreme heat events, yet themselves push towards the worst global heat event of all—a continental nuclear war swiftly followed by a nuclear winter? Imperialist war—in Ukraine, as in Gaza, in Iran, in Lebanon, etc.—is itself a major and entirely disproportionate factor of environmental destruction, waste of resources, and blocking of the scientific cooperation necessary for the ecological transition.
This NATO-compatible Greenism is thus merely a moral cloak for Western hegemonism: it misdirects popular anger towards individual scapegoats (consumer behavior, above all that of the working-class consumer) to shift blame away from the capitalist system itself.
The terrible toll of Maastricht and the prioritization of over-armament
The successive Maastricht-aligned governments have methodically dismantled the public health service, at the very moment when climate imbalances are causing a proliferation of health crises and pollution-related illnesses. They have failed to equip schools to cope with extreme climate events, leaving children to suffocate in overheated classrooms, while sacrificing rail freight to highly polluting trans-European road transport, not to speak of the incessant transcontinental shipping of hundreds of thousands of containers, with highly destructive effects on the sea and the atmosphere.
Today, these same leaders have the effrontery to release hundreds of billions for over-armament and war, while claiming to lack the resources for the ecological and social conversion of productive capacity. This budgetary choice is a blatant illustration of exterminationism: we generously fund the direct instruments of death, while cynically withholding resources for vital infrastructure that could alleviate the environmental crisis.
For rising anti-exterminationist resistance
In the face of this situation, it is not a matter of adding a “green supplement” to neoliberal policies, but of uniting diverse popular resistance movements against capitalist exterminationism itself. The struggle for peace, for the renationalization of key sectors of the economy (energy, transport, healthcare), for ecological planning, for a left exit—that of popular democracy and democratic nationalizations—from the European Union, the euro, and NATO: all of these battles form one and the same front, that of labor against capital, which in current conditions means life against annihilation.
Ecological science turned toward struggle must therefore be intimately associated with the class struggle, the reconstruction of a truly and unapologetically communist project, and the reinstatement of the dialectic of nature and history.
It is only on this condition that the dark clouds gathering over humanity will be pierced by the red glow heralding not a dark end of the world—a battle of Armageddon dreamed of by Trump and Netanyahu—but a luminous end of capitalism and the new Jours Heureux (the French Resistance’s program of social reconstruction for the Liberation) of a new civilization of solidarity.