Fossil Sovereignty and Anthropocene Freedom

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The following is based on a contribution to Salvage’s panel, ‘Freedom in the Twenty-first Century’, at the 2022 Historical Materialism conference in London.

The prospect of ecological collapse and the reassertion of natural limits to growth – or even the programme of de-growth – pose severe challenges to a Marxist politics of freedom. Such a politics has long been premised on the idea of an actually-existing collective abundance that would emancipate individuals from the blind operation of forces external to them. Bourgeois freedom, by contrast, consists of the liberation of individuals from personal domination only to subject them to the general domination of such external forces. This is the ‘abstract domination’, as des-cribed in Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor and Social Domination, of scarcity and the compulsion to sell one’s labour-power. For bourgeois freedom, prosperity is the outcome; for proletarian freedom, abundance is the precondition.

Were a proletarian revolution to succeed in any currently conceivable timescale – in itself a remote proposition – its primary task would be to reverse, or at least modify, the process of growth in order to preserve minimum conditions of habitability. This would imply the transition to forms of power-generation that do not rely on burning fossil fuels and preferably not on the consumption of non-renewable sources of energy in general.

What then is the relationship between energy transition and freedom? And what are the implications of this relation not just for the abolition of currently existing structures of domination, exploitation and oppression but for the prospects of collective emancipation?

This is far too large a question for one essay. What I will try to do here instead is to pose it in a Marxist way, to see if that is useful not just to the project of human survival but of human freedom. Rather than tackle the relationship between the terms, energy transition and collective freedom, in a conceptual way, we must look historically at how bourgeois forms of freedom, of both property and labour, have been intertwined with energy transitions. This is not (just) because these are necessarily examples for a future transition, but because they are the historical preconditions for the present: the point at which we have now arrived and from which any future transition would necessarily be launched.

The starting point lies with Marxist accounts of freedom and where energy transition fits into them, or not – which may also be related to other gaps within such accounts. What I want to explore here is an intuition, as yet no more than that, that they are connected.

For Marxists, ‘freedom’ is not a transhistorical or cross-class value. It belongs to certain historical circumstances, to certain modes of production, and has certain characteristics according to its expression of the class interests generated by those modes of production.

For this reason, Marxist accounts of the history of contemporary freedom are accounts of the origins of bourgeois freedom, including the freedom enjoyed by proletarians under the capitalist mode of production (that is to say, the bourgeois freedom of the worker). These debates therefore revolve around the nature and history of what Marx calls the ‘dual freedom’ of the direct labourer, which is what makes a proletarian.

Dual freedom means that the proletarian is divested of the coercive control of a particular person over them, but also divested of the means of production by which they can reproduce themselves. Free to choose, and free to lose; free to work and free to starve.  The process by which Marx argues this separation occurred – elaborated upon in chapter nine of the first volume of Capital – is one aspect of ‘primitive accumulation’. As the labourer is divorced from the means of labour, labour power is transformed into a commodity, the exchange of which is then co-ordinated on the market. This process is central to the formation of capital as a relationship between exploiter and exploited.

The other aspect of primitive accumulation is the accumulation of capital as a stock – a history ‘written in letters of blood and fire’ – through slavery and colonial loot amongst other things. Both of these aspects may have a connection to energy transition.

Before exploring this possibility, however, it is important to note that primitive accumulation has formed the starting point for Marxist accounts of freedom because it is the story of the emancipation of ‘free labour’, and ‘free labour’ is the necessary counterparty of capital.

From this account of freedom comes the influential idea that non- or pre-capitalist societies are characterised by specific relations of personal domination (even if their ideological categories of religious belief, caste or hereditary relationships, are abstractions in the sense of not referring to particular people), whereas capitalism is characterised by abstract domination. This is a shared baseline across otherwise very different Marxist thinkers such as Ellen Wood, Postone, Derek Sayer, Heide Gerstenberger and others, although they diverge from that baseline in terms of how they characterise and study capitalism, and its associated forms of political power.

There are several problems here with what ‘domination’ means and who is subjected to it, but these can be left aside for now. More important is the implication of this argument for the contradictory nature of bourgeois freedom. That implication, as drawn out in the German state derivation debates of the 1970s, is that there is something different about the capitalist state that implies the defence of property in general.

The capitalist state-form, unlike the feudal or, as I prefer, tributary state, is not just the victory of one group of exploiters over others in a hierarchical relation but the coordination mechanism by which all exploiters may compete with each other without the system tearing itself apart. This then implies the defence of all forms of property. That is to say, the capitalist state, then, defends not only particular properties or property holders but all forms of property. It is this that makes the capitalist state capitalist, not that capitalists run it.

This is also what distinguishes ‘republican’ ideas of liberty from liberal accounts of freedom. But as Andrew Sartori in Empire and Liberalism and Aaron Jakes in Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism both note, this introduces a contradiction into the bourgeois conception of freedom. The property owner of labour power – the worker – is accorded the same freedom, at least formally, as the owner of property in the means of production. Hence the formal neutrality of the bourgeois state, which is always riven by this contradiction.

There are some problems with this account. First of all, its apparent indifference to actually-existing capitalist states, which are frequently run not just for but by identifiable groups of capitalists. Second, the apparent taking at face value of the bourgeois state’s claim that it is neutral and separate from society, or that it doesn’t subject labour to direct domination. This leads onto the most powerful objection: that in both its genesis and its operation the capitalist mode of production has been constitutively dependent on unfree, violently dominated labour-power. The distinction between free and unfree labour has not just coincided with but formed the substance of the social practice known as ‘race’. This has operated either at the level of individual un-freedom, or rather the making of a category of un-individuals who can then be perpetually unfree, or at the collective level, through the denial of sovereignty in the form of colonisation.

I will return to this point. First I want to add another one, which I think is connected: the absence in the Marxist account of dual freedom of the actual operation of power. By this I mean not political, ideological or social power but physical power: the generation and transmission of energy to do work. Why, and how, might these be connected?

III. In the past two decades, the flourishing of eco-socialist scholarship has begun to re-introduce the physical generation of power into this account of capitalist transition. As with the debate on dual freedom and abstract versus personal domination, or economic versus extra-economic coercion, I will not survey all of the individual contributions but rather establish a baseline claim among them. That baseline is the necessity of fossil fuels for the rift in the social metabolism with nature that produces and reproduces human life. But why might this be connected to primitive accumulation and dual freedom? And what could that connection be?

The answer to this question lies in a key argument in Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital. Malm’s claim is that different sources of energy allow for different social relations of production. He distinguishes between flow (wind, water, sunshine); animate (muscle power, animals); and finally stock (fossil, coal, oil, although perhaps nuclear power would come into this too). Energy as stock allows for full subsumption of the labour process. Industrialisation in England and Scotland from the turn of the eighteenth century occurred because it allowed the class power of the capitalist to be exercised in the production process rather than something dependent upon the flow of wind or water power, not under their control.

In Malm’s account, energy transition is thus mapped onto the shift between formal and real subsumption, which historically occurred after the separation of labour from the means of production, and therefore the ‘economy’, in England at least. There may still be a connection, however, in the following ways. First of all: the initial burst of deforestation that occurred in England in the fifteenth-seventeenth centuries. Some of Marx’s earliest writings, collected in Daniel Bensaïd’s edited volume The Dispossessed, concern the so-called ‘wood theft’ debates in Prussia about the assertion of landowners’ (newly established) ‘rights’ to property in the fallen wood on their land which peasants customarily gathered for fuel.

In England, and to some extent in Scotland, deforestation (for fuel and for ship- and housebuilding) did coincide with enclosures; the separation of the labourer from the means of production. In fact, coal began to be widely used for heating and fuel in England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century because of an ‘energy crisis’ caused by the shortage of wood. Wood is a renewable resource – the forest is allowed to grow back – but in other ways it is a stock, since it is moveable and also exhaustible once a forest has been chopped down.

Animate and flow energy is topographically limited. It is uneven in its distribution in certain sites and therefore the exploitative accumulation of a surplus from it requires – outside of a marketed portion – going to that site of production or compelling, ideologically or physically, the producers to render some of their production from it. That is to say, personal domination or what Ellen Wood calls ‘extra-economic’ coercion. Stock fuel, as Malm notes, allows for formal subsumption, industrialisation, and urbanisation. That means control by the capitalist, but it also means the exploited comes to the exploiter. Cities and towns are much harder places in which to enforce coercive, unbounded exploitation because people can run away and find other options. This is one reason why people move to them, and so many have – either in their own countries of origin or through migration to other cities around the world.

Moreover, stock, again as Malm shows, provides the basis for abstract labour time (which is key to Postone’s argument, for example). The wage relation conceals the exploitation that direct coercive or personal domination, based on flow or animate energy, reveals.

These may not be historically defensible claims. There are some large objections. The most obvious ones are to do with the previously mentioned point about the prominence of unfree, and also unwaged, labour, in both the genesis and perpetuation of capital accumulation. And indeed, until the nineteenth century in Scotland at least, coal miners were not free – they wore collars bearing the amount of reward available for their return to their master if they ran away. Scottish collieries in fact only stopped using formally unfree labour about thirty years earlier than British plantations in the New World did. The role of unfreed labour, in New World slavery and other forms, was more consequential in providing calorific inputs to metropolitant labour power.The other place that happened or happens, of course, is in the unwaged private domain of the household. 

These objections suggest the need to return to the connection between full emancipation – personal and abstract – under communism and energy transition. I have suggested there may be a connection between the dual freedom and abstract domination of capitalism, and forms of energy as stock. Would there be, or is there reason to talk about there being, such a connection between renewable energy sources and abstract emancipation?

My initial answer is that there is no necessary connection because, first of all, renewable forms of energy generation are still quite significant pieces of the means of production, especially at the scale required, say, to run a public transport system. Second, even if the primary capture of the energy were to take the form of a flow, its storage in, for example, batteries, would act like a stock.

Nonetheless, there might be a different way of looking at this if we consider the nature of proletarian un-freedom. In a 1985 essay, ‘On the Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom’, G A Cohen identifies the nature of proletarian unfreedom as consisting of the collective fact of the compulsion to sell one’s labour power. Even if every individual proletarian were swapped for another individual, making the first a bourgeois, there must exist such a group of proletarians in order for capital accumulation to continue. The condition of the freedom of any given proletarian, or finite group of proletarians, is the continuing compulsion of the others. Hell is other people.

If that compulsion were abolished then capitalism would be abolished, which indeed is precisely the prospectus that we favour. Yet this argument implies a further condition:  that levels of production are sufficient for the compulsion not to arise. Notice, however, that sufficient is not the same as abundant, or rather only abundant relative to an established standard of living.

This leads to the following points. The first is that renewable energy is certainly capable of meeting that level of relative abundance or sufficiency: not luxury communism but adequate enough for proletarian freedom. The second point, however, is that even though, once established, the marginal costs of renewable generation tend to zero, this is not enough on its own to change the distribution of property relations needed to abolish proletarian unfreedom. We can no more expect any putative green capitalism to pass over into eco-socialism than we could have expected fossil-fed industry to evolve into twentieth-century communism.

Jamie Allinson teaches politics and international relations at the University of Edinburgh and is a founding editor of Salvage. He is the author of The Age of Counter-Revolution: States and Revolutions in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2022). He is one of the co-authors of The Tragedy of the Worker (Verso/Salvage Editions, 2021).