Book Review: The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards the Proletarocene

Abstract

The Salvage Collective is a group of academics, public intellectuals and writers who endeavour to resurrect a communist vision in contemporary ruin. The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards the Proletarocene is a manifesto that begins where Marx and Engels finished. Repeating the lines, ‘[w]orkers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win’, Salvage then asks, but ‘[w]hat if the world was already lost?’ (2021: 1). The Communist Manifesto was written when its authors saw the massive changes in material conditions, ushered in by industrialization and the collectivization of labour, as teeming with potential. The potential for abundance made possible through these more efficient and communal modes of production could birth a post-scarcity society. Today, it is hard to sense this utopic impulse. Given the environmentally destructive nature of the industrial capitalism, that metabolic rift which leaves whole ecosystems decimated, Salvage asks how the proletariat can re-imagine communist horizons. How can we build an emancipatory project that reconceptualizes abundance out of devastation? Unflinchingly tracing the lines from the inherently destructive nature of the capitalist logic itself to material examples of the consequences of that logic, Salvage demonstrates that mitigation is no longer an option. Adaptation is the only way forward. If adaptation is to be emancipatory, the relationship between the metabolism of capital, the worker and the asymmetrical effects of the climate crisis must be understood as a class issue. As such, despite the ways that the capitalist class protects itself through green capitalism and global climate summits, the relentless drive for surplus-value that is inherent to capitalist accumulation is fundamentally incompatible with a world that is just to all the species inhabiting it. The hegemonic nature of capital has infiltrated our understanding of energy, science and discovery. Indeed, much of our reliance on carbon-intensive energy is bound to capitalist growth and the ever-increasing productivity that it furnishes. Salvage devotes some time to looking at conceptions of ecology in the early USSR. There, through the science of Vernadsky, we can understand the earth’s ecology and geology as a process of cocreation and interdependence. While this influenced early Soviet policy, it could not survive the ocean of capitalism, the military–industrial complex, global White supremacy, and the now rising eco-fascism that has informed our politics, our media and our horizons. Capitalist production is deeply entangled in carbon-intensive industry. Through the lens of Malm’s work, Salvage reframes the tragedy of the worker, showing that how fossil fuels satisfy the M-C-M′ logic that produces surplus-value. It is the human flow of energy through labour-power that fuels climate collapse. Salvage writes that