Biocommunism

= "a communism emerging from the catastrophes capital now inflicts throughout the bios, the realm of life itself". [1]

Description

Nick Dyer-Whiteford:

"a genealogical note:

The term “biocommunism” was first used by this author over a decade ago (Dyer-Witheford 2010) in a discussion of Marx’s “species-being” (Gattungswesen), re-conceived as a dynamic process of collective becoming in an era where capital is a “planet factory” of terraforming environmental change, digital networks, and gene-splicing technics. That iteration of biocommunism was undertaken in a broadly Promethean and accelerationist framework, affirmative of high-technology species re-design. In this paper, I reconfigure biocommunism as a process of combined social and environmental levelling, creating a social system steering itself between the double boundaries of ecological sustainability and an equalized social development. In this version—less asteroid-mining “fully automated luxury communism” (Bastani 2019), more “half earth” re-wilding (Vettese and Pendergrass 2022)—biocommunism becomes a program fusing the goals of contemporary movements fighting against ecocide and inequality—an “equalogical” power.

Independently, the philosopher Szymon Wróbel l (2020a; 2020b) has developed the concept of biocommunism as process of “population empowerment” in which “power over life is transformed into the power of life itself”, a “fold of being onto itself” (2020a). His exploration offers several plangent formulations resonating with this paper’s line of thought. There is, however, a major divergence between our two accounts of “biocommunism”. For Wróbel it remains a regulative ideal without, and indeed in refusal of, any institutional realization of “biopower”, a “dis-organizing principle”, whereas I consider biocommunism a practical political project in which such power is communized (see Højme 2022).

Obviously both these versions of “biocommunism” stage an encounter between communist thought, pre-eminently Marx’s, with Michel Foucault’s (2007; 2008) proposition that “biopower”—the governance of “life itself“– is a defining feature of modernity, and with its subsequent spin-offs and variants in the work of thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben (1998) and Roberto Esposito (2008). The version I offer here is influenced by the work of Michal Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) and Tiziana Terranova (2009; 2015), for whom biopower exercised from above can be countered by an insurgent biopolitics arising from below, and of several subsequent developments of this line of thought.

Of particular importance, given the centrality of planetary heating to the age of catastrophe, is the work of Emanuele Leonardi (2012) on the biopolitics of climate crisis, and—alongside several associates—on a new articulation of Marxism with “de-growth” ecology (Leonardi 2021; Barca 2020; Feltrin 2021 and 2022; Lassere 2020a and 2020b). Approaching the issue from a different angle is discussion arising from Frederic Jameson’s (2016) controversial vision of socialism as a “universal army of labour” (to which I will return later), and in particular from Alberto Toscano’s (2016; 2020) proposal of a “biopolitics from below”, and responses by Panagiotis Sotiris (2020) and Gareth Dale (2021) in a pandemic context. None of these sources, should, however, be held responsible for the use made of their ideas in the fabrication of biocommunism.

As the issues of a climate emergency and other ecological disasters is central to the agenda of biocommunism, it can be objected that the term merely replicates the problematic of “eco-socialism”, already the topic of a large and important literature (Foster 2000; Moore 2015). If biocommunism seeks to rephrase the issue, it is in part to convey that ecological crisis has entered a new phase in which the time for averting disaster has expired, and battles are now fought out on already-catastrophized ground, demanding more urgent “measures taken” (Brecht 1929). It is also, however, to dispute the hyphen of eco-socialism, which, while critically important in bringing the ecological and social together in left thought, also continues to conceptually separate them.[1] This obscures the contemporary imbrications of politics with nature so apparent in the current polycrisis where, for example, future carbon dioxide concentrations in the planetary atmosphere for generations to come may depend on disruptions of energy sources arising from an horrific but (by historical standards) relatively small central European war. Biopower, biopolitics and hence biocommunism are terms proper to a moment where “ecological” and “governmental” processes relentlessly loop around in mutual reconfiguration.

Finally, biocommunism is defined by a triangulation between three other concepts of communism —"solar communism” (Schwartzman 1996), “war communism” (Malm 2021) and “disaster communism” (Out of the Woods 2018). That is to say, it affirms the potential of a new and plenitudinous mode of species reproduction drawing on clean, renewable and socially-distributed solar energy, and other renewable sources, as prophesized by Schwartzman, but holds that this will have to be created under emergency conditions of disaster, rescue, repair and restoration, as a massive operation of “salvage” (The Salvage Collective 2021). It accepts this will require the emergency mobilization of resources, many of which that can only, at this moment, be commanded through the state apparatus (Malm 2021), but also affirms this requires the exertion of forces beyond that apparatus, as argued by Mezzadra and Neilson (2109), including forms of autonomous organization and mutual aid, as envisaged by Out of the Woods (2020) and other anarchist or communization theorists. The overall perspective is therefore that of an “in-against-and-beyond the state” (Angel 2017) struggle pressing towards the tumultuous reconstruction of communism. "

(https://projectpppr.org/populisms/biocommie-power-and-catastrophe)

Characteristics

Nick Dyer-Whiteford:

"Six elements of biocommunism:

1. new disaster relief systems;
2. opening borders to migrants fleeing calamity;
3. expropriation of capital from crisis-critical industries;
4. rationing of consumption;
5. mobilization of emergency labour; and
6. ecological and economic planning."

(https://projectpppr.org/populisms/biocommie-power-and-catastrophe)

Interview

Nick Dyer-Whiteford:

(interviewed by )

" How do you see the role of technology and technological development in biocommunism?

Nick: Just for the benefit of readers, the “biocommunism” essay to which you refer speculates on new forms of communism that may arise in an “age of catastrophes” (Callinicos 2022), in which capitalism decomposes, either in a gradual degradation, or with explosive rapidity, under the combined forces of economic, epidemiological, ecological and geopolitical crisis. And yes, I have altered my perspective on technology since I first used the term “biocommunism” in the early 2000s, because of the intensification of climate emergency and the biodiversity crisis, critical collaborations undertaken with other authors on the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) (Dyer-Witheford, Kjosen and Steinhoff 2019) and the influence of outstanding work of eco-Marxist scholars, such as you and Lele!

Marx saw capital as an intrinsically machinic system; the very form of the wage relation drives individual capitalists to competitively automate, changing capital’s overall “organic composition” in the direction of mounting machine dependence. He denounced the exploitative violence of this process, in which machinery “pumped out” surplus value from workers and then discarded them, but also saw the rise in industrial productivity generated by machines a prerequisite for a socialist or communist society.

I think that on balance, Marx was, as Amy Wendling (2011) argues, a techno-optimist, who believed the machinery of capital would be taken over by socialism/communism to create a plenitudinous society, but that this vision is shot through with more somber apprehensions and a nascent ecological critique that Kohei Saito (2017) and others has valuably unpacked. Within the Marxist tradition different thinkers and schools have emphasized different aspects of this ambivalence; for example, in the autonomist Marxism all three of us are familiar with, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s (2000) Empire adopted a cyborg optimism while George Caffentzis (2013) and Silvia Federici (2012) embraced relentless techno-critique.

I tended to the former position. Now, however, I think the positive and negative effects of capital’s vast techno-apparatus cannot be easily sorted out by any diachronic, before-and-after logic, whereby what was negative under capital will become a positive in socialism or communism, or by a synchronic claim that technologies wielded destructively by capital against labour become benign when repurposed by workers against capital. As revolution has been delayed and defeated, the destructive effects of the expanding forces of production amplify, and the more deeply imbricated and laminated together are the two sides of this process; abject poverty declines, but the planet over-heats, bringing new ruinations by fire and flood.

Confronting climate change, the “progressive” side of capital is making belated and half-hearted efforts to pry these fused dynamics apart with a market-led energy transition. But as you suggest, Bue, it is doubtful this can be done within an accumulatory system whose destructive but profitable effects outpace innovations intended to abate them. Falls in the market price of solar and wind energy are so-far largely overrun by ongoing fossil fuel extraction and the carbon emissions of deeply embedded industrial and agricultural systems. Even if green capitalism is successful in avoiding the worst of global warming, it may prove a nightmare in which use of renewables becomes a license to obliterate every trace of a natural world without anthropic utility.

My most recent speculations on “biocommunism” (2022) conceive it as a successor system to capitalism in which expansion of the force of production is not the prime directive but subordinated to collective planning oriented to equalitarian and ecological—“equalogical”—priorities. Such a system does not preclude researching and investing in techno-scientific breakthroughs that might maintain or increase material production without ecological devastation. But it would also recognize that radical social reorganizations, including measures such as consumption taxes on the global rich, maximum income limits, planetary energy rationing, and changed dietary norms, may be more important in remedying eco-crisis—both in the short- and long-run—than projected techno-innovations that never come, or come too late, or perpetuate ultimately unsustainable practices, or that when they arrive, worsen the problem they are meant to alleviate.

Once the accumulative compulsion of capital is subtracted from the social equation, can its technological legacy be disentangled or “salvaged” (The Salvage Collective 2021) to operate in accord with a different logic? It may be that, as comrades of the communisation school wager, we confront a techno-system locked to capital by a set of intractable path dependencies (Bernes 2013). But, alternatively, removing the power of profit may make possible what at the moment seem implausible or even chimerical “reconfigurations” (Toscano 2014), such as a high-tech de-growth, in which digital networks and algorithmic calculation help coordinate a planned reduction of material throughputs in the world’s rich zones, rather than speeding their runaway expansion. The crucial aspect of biocommunism is, however, that its social praxis would face these questions without capital’s machinic a priori."

(https://projectpppr.org/populisms/do437fp7nbqzgdnamujml283za7t7u)

Discussion

Nick Dyer-Whiteford:

"David Harvey (2009) remarks that, in an era when all liberal and social democratic ameliorations have weakly prostrated themselves before the prime directives of finance capital, the question is not is another world possible, but ‘is another communism possible?’ Oppositional rebellions face a ‘double blockage’ because ‘the lack of an alternative vision prevents the formation of an oppositional movement, while the absence of such a movement precludes the articulation of an alternative’ (Harvey, 2010: 227).

Can one start to think a communism adequate to the era of climate change, synthetic biologies and global networks? The gamble of Marxism is that liberation lies through, not prior to, alienation: there is no way home, only the capture of the strange planet to which the global worker has been abducted. A politics against the fourth alienation, the alienation of species-becoming, will have to produce a post-capitalism order as different from industrial socialism as industrial socialism was from the agrarian commune, an intensification of tendencies to socialization implicit in the new forces of production and destruction – something we might call a biocommunism

Powerful technology-systems produce large-scale effects rationally incommensurate with private ownership and market allocation. These effects are both constructive and destructive. They include both catastrophic ecological hazards and the productivity necessary for large sectors of the global populations to emerge from chronic immiseration. Confronting this contradiction, socialist progressivism and romantic primitivism alike appear hopelessly linear and one-sided. A diagonal approach that puts to the front the question of the social form within which technologies are produced and deployed is required.

The autonomist tradition inverted the concept of the organic composition of capital to produce the concept of class composition: the technical composition of the class, the labour process in which it was involved, became the basis for a political composition, a capacity to become a counter-power against capitalist command. Extending this line of thought, perhaps we can say that the objective of political struggle is to replace organic composition of capital with the organic composition of the communal, in which decisions of resource allocation and investment are determined in a collective and democratic fashion.

In such a composition, the creations of digital labour could have at least three important roles. First, productivity increases from computerization could be translated, not into profits, but into resources, not just of goods but of time, allowing collective participation in decision making. Second, ‘open source’ circulation of knowledge and inventions would be an important element of new forms of cooperative production. Third, networks would be part of the architecture of an infrastructure of distributed democratic planning and debate of the difficult questions a biocommunist society would face: slowing or mitigating climate change, the role of genetic engineering outside corporate ownership, and, recursively, the level of virtualization that is commensurate with collective democratic planning. As Marx (1977: 447) put it, in one of his very few allusions to Gattungswesen in his later writings, ‘when the worker cooperates in a planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species’.

Economic crisis is colliding with climate chaos, ecological exhaustion, energy depletion and emergent challenges to a fiscally bankrupt but militarily dominant imperial hegemon. To foresee cataclysmic instabilities ahead is neither pessimistic nor optimistic, but a historically-informed extrapolation from current tendencies. In this context, it becomes realistic to consider the cycle of university rebellions now traversing Europe, the pulsing of industrial revolt in Southern China, the climate change assemblies of the farmers and miners of Bolivia and the migrant worker movements raging from Phoenix to Marseilles as anticipations of larger tumults to come.

As this essay undergoes final revision, the contending potentials of planetary labour under digital conditions have become dramatically visible in the popular revolts sweeping North Africa and the Middle East, revolts whose main antagonists are dictatorial and kleptocratic client regimes of global capital. On the one hand, the ignition of these uprisings--one of whose immediate catalysts was the Wikileaks exposure of the corruption of the Tunisian regime--and their rapid circulation, via satellite television, mobile phone, and social media networks, testify to how contemporary means of communication can, despite censorship and black-out, abruptly burst apart the limits on thought, speech and action imposed by the dominant order. On the other, however, the insurgents who fought out against security forces in streets and squares with stones, sticks and small arms, in the most brutally immediate combat, are a defiant, collective self- assertion by subjects who have been excluded from the benefits of the so-called information economy. They are an eruption of populations consigned by the world market to the margins of high-technology development, to labour at its ignored material base, in oil fields and gas pipelines, mines, waste sites and farms. They are consigned to a reserve army of the un- and under-employed, suffering gyrations in food prices dictated by climate change and financial speculation in an immiseration from which migration offers the only escape. Western media have focused on the first part of this equation–the undeniable importance of computer networks–for the uprisings; but in doing so they have created a narrative that not only focuses on the most affluent elements in the insurgent movements, but also complacently affirms the merits of market-driven technological progress. What such narratives underplay is the second, crucial, aspect of the uprisings, namely the explosive stockpile of equally market-driven unemployment, exploitation and inequality–that is to say, of class conflict--that underlies the revolts.

Regardless of their outcome, whether catastrophic, compromised or victorious in unimaginably experimental ways, these uprisings have already returned to the political horizon possibilities of radical self-organization that have in so many places been banished for a generation. They are revolutions detonated by the meeting of extraordinary high technological development and extreme inequality, a contradiction that defines the condition of the global worker, and whose resolution will determine the trajectory of human species-becoming. In such struggles, the future of the ‘actual living species’ (Marx, 1964: 112) will depend on the level of biocommunist organization."

(http://www.ephemerajournal.org/contribution/digital-labour-species-becoming-and-global-worker)