Biocommunism

Biocommunism emerges from the catastrophes now inflicted throughout the bios, the realm of life itself, by capital. It calls for new disaster relief systems, opening borders to climate refugees, the expropriation of capital from crisis-critical industries, the rationing of consumption, the mobilisation of emergency labour, and ecological and economic planning.

Biocommunism affirms the potential of a new, plenitudinous mode of species reproduction drawing on clean, renewable and socially-distributed solar energy and other renewable sources. But this will only be created under emergency conditions of disaster, rescue, repair and restoration, as a massive operation of ‘salvage.’ This will require both the mobilisation of resources only presently commanded through the state apparatus, and new forms of autonomous organisation and mutual aid. Battles are now fought out on already-catastrophised ground, and demand more extreme remedial measures than envisaged in many eco-socialist versions of a Green New Deal or other preventative plans.

‘Biocommunism’ disputes the hyphen of eco-socialism. The hyphen, while bringing the ecological and social together in left thought, also continues to conceptually separates them. This obscures the profound imbrications of the social and the natural so apparent in the current polycrisis, where, for example, imperial geopolitics spawn wars that create energy crises that shift the dynamic of climate crisis, and those ecological dynamics then rebound as the catalyst of further social conflicts. Biopower, biopolitics and biocommunism are terms proper to a moment in this unified field where ‘ecological’ and ‘governmental’ processes relentlessly loop in mutual reconfiguration.

Marx often used the terms ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ interchangeably. But, since Lenin, it has generally been held that ‘socialism’ refers to an initial stage of human emancipation, where liberation must contend with poverty, material shortages, and other residues of capitalism, while ‘communism’ designates a later or higher phase where, with the forces of production freed from archaic restraints, society can be organised according to the principle of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’.

It may be objected that what is described here as biocommunism, including mention of essential labour, rationing of resources and even ecological limits to growth, is really an account of socialism. However, in an age of extinctions – both human extinctions of other species, and risks of human auto-extinction – the relation of socialism and communism should be rethought. Socialism could be understood as a phase in which an emancipatory project depends on a progressive amassing of the capacity to mobilise human populations and environmental resources for production. Communism – or biocommunism – might then be a moment at which, for still-anthropocentric reasons of self-preservation, biopower is subjected to a social limitation to avoid eradicating the ecological ‘web of life’ in which humanity is enmeshed. This would be a point at which ‘to each according to their need’ is re-interpreted by the recognition that human need includes, materially and psychologically, the need for flourishing non-human species and populations of plankton, fungi, insects, frogs and other entities upward along the evolutionary scale.

In capitalism, where resource allocations continues to be stratified by intersecting forces of class, gender and racialisation, the restraint or reduction of productive powers, repudiating growth to diminish ecological destruction, would be tantamount to reactionary consolidation of established pyramids of exploitation and dispossession. The only way in which a self-diminution of human interspecies ascendancy could be socially tolerable is if it were accompanied by a razing of differential intra-human allocations of wealth and well-being. That is why biocommunism must be a project both equalitarian and ecological, a double subversion of capitalism sufficient to revive a name striking fear in the current order; ‘commie’ – or rather, ‘biocommie.’

Vital Systems

As capitalism’s own forces of production turn against it, biocommunist organisation starts at the point of destruction, ensuring the safety of populations struck by disasters, fast and slow: pandemic outbreaks; fires, floods, super-storms, droughts and heatwaves whose frequency indexes global warming; what Jairus Groves terms the ‘savage ecology’ of war. The multiplication of these terrifying events, and consequent collapse-threatening pressures on hospitals, medical aid and burial services, food and water supply, transportation, energy grids and communication networks, signals the failure of the existing social order. Rescue and protection of the endangered becomes a touchstone of any successor system.

Stephen Collier and Andrew Lakoff describe how in advanced capitalism there is an apparatus of ‘vital systems’ used for the ‘government of emergencies.’ It comprises centralised and specialised organisations (e.g., the United States Federal Emergency Management Administration or Centre for Disease Control), and regional and municipal agencies of rescue, policing, hospitalisation, medical care, shelter and sustenance of displaced populations and reconstruction of damaged areas. These institutions were created to manage risks arising from within the capitalist modernity they defend, as a biopolitical tool-kit to control civil disorders, suppress diseases of urban poverty and in preparations for war.

In the era of neoliberalism, however, such crisis services have been undermined by the accumulative logic of the very order they protect. Austerity cut-backs and just-in-time logistics have depleted or dismantled supply depots, dissolved organisational centres, privatised and outsourced operations. Increasing threadbare ‘vital systems’ are tightly geared to protection of property and the circulation of capital. They are shot through with authoritarianism and discrimination, manifesting in racialised policing of storm-struck cities and repeated failures to protect low-income communities. Emergency relief problems of capacity and inequity festering for decades are now about to be intensified by global polycrisis.

This lack of preparedness was demonstrated by Covid-19. Confronting a long-predicted zoonotic pathogen crisis, liberal democracies oscillated between the dual priorities of preserving social reproduction (shutdown) and continuing capitalist accumulation (business as usual), and were beset by institutional incoherencies and material shortages. Decades of underfunding, deregulation and privatisation of health care systems intensified the pandemic chokepoint of intensive care services, whose collapse could only be forestalled by broad restrictions on public behaviour.

Although in the wealthiest nations relatively generous unemployment benefits were available for some workers, elsewhere employees had to fight for ‘quarantine’ wages, while designated ‘frontline’ workers had to toil on, sometimes without basic sick leave provisions. These real governmental failures were avidly exploited by the far right, mis-representing a scene of disarrayed disciplinarity as a sinister, seamless conspiracy of elite control. Neo-fascists seized on Gorgio Agamben’s portrayal of lockdowns and vaccine mandates as totalitarian biopolitics to repudiate any broad social solidarity, promoting ideologies of individual sovereignty and/or race war.

The task of biocommunism is not to ratify such occult theories, but rather, criticising the insufficiencies of capital’s disaster relief, to build new vital systems. Biocommunist disaster relief is a politics of care. It would make major social investments to deal with epidemiological, meteorological and military disasters, ranging from distributed vaccine manufacture capacities to urban cooling centres to evacuation and shelter provisions, with special focus on the most vulnerable social strata. It would normalise replacement income for livelihoods lost to disaster, rebuilding of destroyed homes, and reconstruction of disrupted communities, including trauma treatment, relocation and retraining for disaster victims. It would prepare cadres of communicators who could, across class, gender and racialised social divisions, convey the rationale for emergency measures and relay criticism and counter-proposals from varied social groups to planners.

None of this would prevent disaster relief from being painful and contentious. However, in contrast to the seething social toxicity stirred by capital’s partial efforts, it would foster communal solidarity. Nor should vital care systems be purely state-led. Mutual aid practices that emerge in catastrophes inspire anarchist and autonomist concepts of ‘disaster communism,’ which the Out of the Woods collective describes as ‘a seizing of the means of social reproduction.’ Recent instances include Occupy Wall Street relief operations after Hurricane Sandy, community movements after Mexican earthquakes, and volunteer Covid-19 pandemic activism in Milan. It is impractically romantic to imagine mutual aid could currently replace state-based vital systems for marshalling technologies, supplies, personnel, and expertise. But the reorganisation of such services to combines state provision and self-organisation is a real possibility. In this respect practices of popular mobilisation in face of natural disaster, still alive in Cuba as an offshoot of revolutionary war tradition, should be revived within biocommunism, now as part of populations’ struggles against capitalocene calamity.

De-Bordering

Issues of migration and refuge are central to biocommunism. Poverty, ecological devastation, war and oppression today displace millions. Globally, populations least responsible for carbon emissions, and most vulnerable in terms of poverty, frail infrastructures and insufficient public services, are subjected to the most serious climate cataclysms. Flight tends to local routes, from one poor and disadvantaged country to another, but also presses towards the rich world, across the Mediterranean, the US–Mexico border and other frontiers where migrants face exclusion, detention, deportation, criminalisation, abandonment and death.

Biocommunism embraces the necessity of a new politics of movement. This paper does not adjudicate debates between advocates of ‘open borders’ – relaxing state regulation on migration – and ‘no frontiers’ – aiming for the abolition of states tout court. But it does affirm a broad ‘de-bordering’ orientation, understanding that this process may require several stages and components to building the infrastructures, policies and practices to transform flows of movement and settlement. Thomas Nail categorises these under the headings of ‘sanctuary’ – refusing cooperation with (or dismantling) state agencies seeking to arrest and deport migrants; ‘solidarity’ – providing access to medicine, housing, learning and communication; and ‘status’ – recognition as a full member of a new community.

But biocommunism is not just expansion of liberal immigration programs. Rather, it recognises the proletarian nature of global migration. Thus ‘sanctuary’ will become governmental protection of migrants from racist persecution, human trafficking, workplace exploitation, and slave labour. Solidarity will encompass the original meaning of the term as labour solidarity, systematically connecting and integrating migrants with unions and worker organisations, combatting the way capital benefits so powerfully from division and insecurity in the workforce, while ‘status’ would comprehend new rights of livelihood for all detached from a competitive wage market discussed later in this paper.

Migrancy is geopolitical issue involving out-flow as well as in-flow. Joseph Nevins makes the case for ‘migration as reparations,’ whereby populations deprived of the ‘right to stay’ in home regions wracked by destructive colonialisms and climate change gain a ‘right to move’ and participate in the remittance economy. This is a compelling argument. But it carries the implicit dangers of treating out-migration regions as sacrifice-zones fated to become uninhabitable. Biocommunism therefore defends the right to stay as well as the right to move. This requires more than just large scale international subsidies for mitigation and adaption measures in the regions of climate change’s most severe effect. Military interventions causing migrant flight, such as those in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, must be ended, as should the extractive ventures of multinational capital creating ecological and social chaos in the global South. All these steps need to be set within a framework of long-term planning for the steady equalisation of global. living standards.

De-bordering is difficult, not just because of practical problems of reorganising vast planetary population flows, but because of racism. The European and North American response to Ukrainian refugees from Russian invasion demonstrates the humanitarian generosity that migration can inspire, but also, in its contrast to treatment of refugees from other parts of the world, and in occasions of glaring discrimination against Ukrainians of colour, how selective that benevolence can be. Migration is the chosen field on which ‘fossil fascism’, as Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective dub it, will fight in the era of global warming, setting against it notions of nationalist eco-sustainability. Yet the costs and dangers of perpetual fortification against migration, the labour shortages of zones with ageing populations and low birthrates, the intensification of internal climate-migration, not to mention every impulse of human-kindness ultimately tell against the far right. Biocommunism dissolves borders and redefines sovereignty for a nomadic global worker.

Emergency Expropriation

Socialised ownership of the means of production is a basic tenet of communism. Its importance heightens amidst interweaving disasters. But in a variation on classic Marxist thought, while expropriation is today sometimes vital to expand production, it can also be necessary to shut production down. Two campaigns by movements for global equality and ecological protection indicate this dual case for expropriation of crisis-critical capitalism.

The first is the ‘no profit from pandemic’ campaign for eliminating the intellectual property rights of big pharma. Rapid development of Covid-19 vaccines by companies such as Pfizer and Moderna, achieved at record speed in the United States, the European Union and Britain, was an outcome of state-capital cooperation. Governments partnered with drugmakers, pouring in billions of dollars to procure raw materials, finance clinical trials and retrofit factories. Billions more were committed to buy the finished product. But this success created stark global inequities in availability – vaccine apartheid. This global inequality allowed Covid-19 to continue spreading and increased the likelihood of vaccine-resistant variants. India and South Africa advanced an initiative to temporarily suspend intellectual property rules for Covid-19 vaccines and other coronavirus-related medical equipment, waiving patents to allow more countries to manufacture Covid-19 doses. Mounting worldwide pressure forced the US to shift from opposition to partial support, making some short-term patent waivers, but leaving the full scope of vaccination segregation untouched. This and scores of other examples of unevenly researched and distributed medical drugs make the case for moving their control from private hands to new global-public institutions.

The second example is the ‘Leave It In the Ground’ campaign against carbon capital. Ending global boiling demands drastic reduction in fossil fuel use. Full use of known reserves would (absent massive and, at the moment, speculative, techno-fixes) drive atmospheric CO₂ concentrations to extreme heights. Therefore one thrust of radical ecological movements is conversion of fossil capital enterprises to public utilities – to shut them down. Thus, Holly Jean Buck’s program for ‘ending things’ includes a five-step fossil fuel phaseout, moving through moratoria on prospecting, subsidy withdrawal, capping and ramp-down of production and ‘nationalisation to exit.’ As a major share of global oil production is undertaken by state owned companies, such as Saudi Aramco. biocommunist socialisation therefore cannot be conceived simply as nationalisation. It would be a deeper de-commodification, replacing management cadres and reorienting enterprises away from the world market, and towards goals of eliminating carbon emissions, ensuring a just-transition for fossil industry workers (a process crucial to disarm opposition) and converting facilities to the production of publicly owned and controlled carbon capture technologies.

These two cases illustrate the double-sided case – expansionary, for vaccines, terminative, for fossil fuels – for counter-catastrophic capital expropriation. There are many other examples. For example, inseparable from discussion of energy extraction is that of governance of electrical grids, in which private and public utility companies with entrenched attachments to carbon capital vie with unregulated green capitalism whose freebooting avarice threatens to make clean energy transition massively costly for working-class households. Adjacent to operation of the grid itself is the nexus of platform capitalism, its importance highlighted both by the logistical demands of pandemic crisis, and the destructive effects of social media mis- and dis-information, spurring parallel discussions about the public expansion of basic digital services and of reducing the flows of mis or dis-information fostered micro-targeted advertising).

Stressing the ‘expropriative’ aspect of biocommunism qualifies a term now widely used in discussion of collective resource control: ‘commons.’ The concept of the common is central to any communism – how could it not be? It has been crucial to developing models of communal ownership more varied and inventive than bureaucratised nationalisation: trusts, cooperatives, open-source production and peer-to-peer networks. But ‘commonist’ discourse can suggest a supersession of capital by a sheer proliferation of commons – say, creation of open-source software or establishment of worker cooperatives. As these example suggest, capitalism can accommodate a multiplication of commons, foster their initiation and certainly reap their fruits. Coexistence of commons and capital is feasible, but nearly always to the latter’s advantage. Commons move towards communism only when they diminish capital. That is why, in the face of intensifying climate disasters, new disease outbreaks, blackouts, power failures and information wars it is important to emphasise not just developing new forms of communal production but also abolishing privatised ownership of key industries.

Ration and Provision

In the age of catastrophe, the obverse of socialised production is rationed consumption. Rationing is not a topic favoured by Marxisms; confidence in expanding forces of production steers away from the topic. Even eco-socialists, rightly critical of corporations shifting responsibility for climate disaster to individual eco-footprints, fight shy of rationing discourse. Yet in polycrisis, rationing repeatedly rears its head, either as immediate response to shortages of oil, gas or food caused by wartime disruptions and corporate opportunism, or, in a longer-term horizon, as an emergency fallback if carbon taxes, carbon trading and other market mechanisms fail to halt global warming.

Biocommunism must therefore revisit the ration question, in both ecological and equalitarian aspects. While the topic summons the binary trope of ‘despotic state versus free market,’ it also prompts recognition of markets as systems of rationing by price. Focusing on use- rather than exchange- values, rationing foregrounds the material effects of capitalism’s patterns of production and consumption on bodies and ecosystems with specific metabolic limits and tipping points, rather than endorsing illusions of infinite fungibility implicit in monetary general equivalence.

Stan Cox’s Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present and Future of Rationing shows that: i) the ration was basic to many pre-capitalist societies; b) socialist societies have used rationing as a means of social equalisation; c) within capitalism, non-market rationing is regularly deployed to allocate necessities such as food, fuel, or water when escalating inequities threaten social order. In authoritarian regimes, (e.g., contemporary Egypt), a food ration for the poor, coexisting with markets for the better-off, stabilises vertiginous inequalities – unless the ration is reduced, an occasion for riots. But in crisis situations comprehensive rationing of food and other supplies has not only enjoyed broad support, but also modelled wider social equalisation, as Britain’s war time rationing prefiguration of a welfare state.

The ruling class’s major contribution to ecological crisis is its control of investment in production, but consumption is an aspect of this larger situation. Carbon emissions rise with wealth, peaking for a billionaire class with multiple mansions, giant yachts and private jets. Rationing of specific ecologically damaging goods, such as airline flights, would restrain consumption in ways that both reduce ecological destruction and inequalities in access to material resources. Broader quotas would have more pronounced effects. In their Half Earth Socialism Troy Vitesse and Drew Pendergrass propose a ‘2,000-watt society’, with per-person limits to energy use requiring ‘severe cuts in the rich world while allowing growth in poor countries’. Buck points out that in 2016 a Shell Global report proposed a ‘decent quality of life’ requires 100 gigajoules of energy per person per year. Noting that the USA consume 300 gigajoules of energy per person per year, while Europe and China use 150 and 100 respectively, it proposed (conveniently for Shell) doubling global energy production, but also equalising use levels around the planet, a ‘radical proposition’ that Buck observes, ‘far to the left’ of mainstream Western environmentalism.

Rationing should be reconceived as not just limit but guarantee, prohibition but also promise, security as well as scarcity. The long-running debate about Universal Basic Income is in its way a discussion about a ration, albeit one that confirms the norm of commodity exchange. More promising is the Universal Basic Services proposition, in which all members of a community receive unconditional access to some mix of shelter, sustenance, health care, education, and legal aid. However, this proposal too is conceived as a subordinate, palliative addition to a market system – a dole of use-values.

A potential reversal of this logic is George Monbiot’s ‘public luxury, private sufficiency’ principle. This envisages major social investment in urban environments, public services, collective housing projects and mass transport systems, combined with rotated chances for everyone to occasionally enjoy extraordinary holidays and cultural events, alongside modest, ecologically sustainable levels of personal consumption. Monbiot shrinks from calling for decapitation of capital, sticking to a familiar green trope of ‘neither communism nor capitalism’ – yet his model actually implies dislodging for-profit accumulation from its direction of everyday life, organising society around universal provision of a limited but assured and equalitarian basket of goods. As capitalist poly-crisis renders markets chaotic, exacerbates social inequalities and accelerates ecological devastation, such biocommunist guarantee may become increasingly attractive.

Essential Workers

Biocommunism will not be a post-work utopia but rather a radical recomposition of labour. Covid-19 showed how rapid such recomposition can be. Jobs were suspended or relocated, with or without recompense; governments recruited and redirected workers into designated sectors; for millions, home transformed to workspace; for millions others, a hazardous mobility accelerated; unwaged, gendered social reproduction labour was highlighted; frontline workers in previously despised low wage sectors or public services loudly praised, (though largely without improvement in the conditions of their toils. As Sandro Mezzadra has observed, a central figure became ‘the essential worker’ – labour, ranging from hospital staff to supermarket workers to cybersecurity personnel, governmentally required to toil through crisis.

Under current conditions, ‘essential work’ legitimises continued exploitation of labour indispensable for commodity production and circulation – forced labour. But it is worth thinking what form it could take in a system whose prime directive was the social and ecological well-being of its population. Writing of climate emergency, Cory Doctorow observes:

Remediating climate change will involve unimaginably labor-intensive tasks, like relocating every coastal city in the world kilometers inland, building high-speed rail links to replace aviation links, caring for hundreds of millions of traumatised, displaced people, and treating runaway zoonotic and insect borne pandemics. . . . Every person whose job is obsolete because of automation will have ten jobs waiting for them, for the entire foreseeable future.

To this list can be added emergency firefighters, mass tree planters, rewilding land clearers, solar panel installers, housing insulators, coders of climate-sensing software , gigafactory workers, and many more – a belated fulfilment of plans for ‘a million climate jobs’ or a Green New Deal, but unfortunately now instantiated not in forward-looking crisis anticipation but under increasingly chaotic conditions of biospheric deterioration.

In capital, much truly essential work will, because unprofitable, not be considered ‘essential’ at all. It will remain undone as habitats degrade. Public order will be maintained by threadbare state agencies. More lucrative developments in protected housing for the rich, geotechnologies and corporate-designed urban reconstruction will spur a growing commercial or private-public climate adaptation and mitigation sector. Essential work will be exploitative, with core teams of technical expertise surrounded by a penumbras of precarious labour, shielding enterprises from financially volatile conditions but providing workers only minimal protections from mounting environmental risk. Biocommunism, however, will socialise essential labour. Catastrophe remediating work–running vital security systems, constructing and operating refugia and sanctuaries, operating communal utilities, maintaining childcare and schooling providing universal rations and services, and in planning of all the above–will understood as both a necessity and a communal responsibility.

In 2016 Fredric Jameson controversially proposed a socialist utopia based on a ‘universal army of labour.’ All capable persons would perform publicly crucial tasks for four hours a day (or an equivalent period calculated weekly, monthly, annually) as a condition of citizenship. Outside of this period, people’s time would be their own. All those fulfilling this obligation, and all those excused for reasons of health, or domestic care, would receive their equal share of social wealth and services. Jameson’s ‘army’ proposal shocked left anti-statists and anti-militarists. But his ‘army’ is clearly intended to conduct tasks across the entire economy, auto-dissolving its military vocation. And while the thought of state mobilisation may reasonably trigger nightmares of totalitarian control, it is worth imagining other possible instantiations.

We can envisage polycrisis pressures producing an enlarged version of the ‘government job guarantee’ attached to some versions of Green New Deal, as an employment opportunity and perhaps as social obligation. The execution of ‘essential work’ can be conceived not as authoritarian control but as a process rich in contradiction, contention, and social ferment. Its decision-making should be understood not as top-down command, but rather in terms of mission-oriented tasks, in which execution of broad objectives is devolved to on-the-scene units, and alternative implementations debated and worked out.

Biocommunist essential workers will have their own work-team organisations, combining features of both worker cooperatives and unions with voice on issues of public provisions, worker health and safety, task assignment and execution. These will be engaged in projects, such as greening cities, or localisation of food supply, for communities of which they may themselves be a part, and whose survival and flourishing will be an object of pride. These communities too will have their own councils and assemblies, which can both contest work-teams’ decisions and practices and collaborate with them to make interventions and adjustments at higher levels of the project.

Seen in this light, Jameson’s universal army, with its half day dedicated to labour in the realm of necessity and half liberated for realm of freedom, comes to resemble the mix of anarchism and central planning imagined in Ursula Le Guin’s sci-fi depiction of the communised planet Anarres. The essential worker becomes ‘essential’ not only in protecting vital social and species functions but also as a crucial agent in collective planning, to which we now turn.

Bio-Planning

Foucault’s concept of biopolitics is associated with his idea of governmentality – that is to say, government conceived not solely as state power but in a more capillary form, enacted through a range of institutions and organisations with varying relations to and degrees of autonomy from the centralised apparatuses of rulership, combining – in Deleuzian terms – both molar and molecular components, or, in Foucault’s own language, a ‘mesh of power.’ The political valency of this ‘mesh’ is ambivalent. It has the potential to be a creeping, insidious and implacable disciplinary mechanism, all the more deadly to the degree that is diffuse and decentralised But there is an inverse concept, where the disaggregated and distributed nature of power becomes the occasion to reverse or oscillate the directions of its biopolitical flows from heights to depths, peripheries to centres, hubs to spokes, persistently reconfiguring the architecture of power.

Replacing profit with planning is core to any society beyond capital. The last decade has seen a striking revival in left discussion of planning processes, with emphasis both on the possibilities of distributed, rather than centralised planning, and on ecological planning. In biocommunism, the unions of emergency workers and the councils of environmental proletarians, and other communal organisations become interlocutors of state planning agencies so that proposals from above engage with counter-planning critique and counterproposal from below. In this way, planning is a function diffused out and away from the organs of a centralised state into a wider, democratised process – what Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto refer to ‘vast association.’ When populations cease to be the object of biopower, but become its subject a ‘biopolitics from below,’ a powerful, protagonistic biocommunism, becomes possible.

Biocommunism would be system steering between a ceiling of environmental sustainability and a floor of equalised social development. The conceptual basis for such planning exists in ‘boundary models’ presented by green authors such as Kate Raworth advocating for a zone of ‘fair and just’ social development between ecological overshoot and economic shortfall. The problem with such programs is, however, their chronic refusal to confront the incompatibility between its goals and capital’s accumulative drive. In practice, boundary modelling has been repeatedly hijacked by corporate green-washers to legitimise ongoing economic extraction, preserving the ‘growth’ imperative. Biocommunist planning would be a counter-version, weaponised to fight through to the abolition of capital.

Biocommunism would therefore be a system without a compulsion to economic growth, capable of both expansion and contraction of humanities material throughputs; as Alessandra Mularoni and I put it elsewhere, this

would likely mean less of some things and more of others: degrowing carbon industries to termination; growing renewable energy sources; degrowing high-intensity consumption in the Global North while improving living standards in the Global South; more bandwidth for planning global energy flows, less for planetary selfie-tsunami.

Biocommunism would not discount possible technological solutions to the climate emergency and other ecological crises, but also recognise such fixes are not going to arrive in time to prevent the need for deep civilisational changes. Biocommunism reworks both the ‘relations’ and ‘forces’ of production, subordinating the pro- and anti-tech question to the double imperatives of ecological vitality and social equalisation

Biocommunist planning need not necessarily supply the highly variegated complex consumerism of advanced capitalist economies. Although digital, networked and algorithmic planning hold out possibilities for solving historically intractable ‘calculation problems’ presented by such economies, it should not be presumed that such a consumption-driven society would be the biocommunist summum bonum. A mode of production beyond capital could have different goals, trading off high consumerism for free time, environmental plenitude, social solidarity and species-survival. This essay has suggested that ecological and equalitarian principles favour provision of a common ‘basket of goods,’ and observance of ‘public luxury and private sufficiency’ principles, perhaps with a subordinated market sector supplying a reduced range of consumer items. To the degree that social consensus is forged around such common goals, calculation problems are simplified. Struggle towards such an end is truly radical but may also come to seem pragmatic in the midst of the vast market breakdowns in which capital initiates its own spontaneous, barbaric degrowth.

Nick Dyer-Witheford is author of Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism and, with Alessandra Mularoni, of Cybernetic Circulation Complex: Big Tech and Planetary Crisis.