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| 25-April-2025 |
Marx’s profound insights about capital, as a social relation – a fundamentally exploitative and alienating relationship between people – can be a powerful set of tools for us, despite being formulated more than a century and a half ago.
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| “Philosophy”, by Salvator Rosa. See “About the picture”, at the end |
In their book Overshoot: how the world surrendered to climate breakdown, Andreas Malm and Wim Carton provide us with examples of how NOT to use these tools. Here I propose three points for discussion.
First, Malm and Carton’s argument on the move from fossil fuels to renewables (which comprises the book’s longest chapter) starts by welcoming the work of Mark Jacobson and his colleagues. They used computer models to show that, technologically, solar panels, wind farms, hydro and other renewable resources could produce sufficient energy to replace all fossil fuels.[1]
Malm and Carton are apparently undisturbed by Jacobson and co’s indifference to social factors – how these factors deprive hundreds of millions of people of access to technologies, determine the way technologies are used, and shape technological change.
They (Malm and Carton) welcome Jacobson and co’s supposedly “overwhelming” evidence that fossil fuels could be eliminated “without any needs sacrificed” (Overshoot, page 172). Fuelling aviation, shipping and petrochemicals would be tricky, they admit (page 186), but assure readers these can easily be solved.
Malm and Carton refer to the disputes among energy specialists about Jacobson and co’s conclusions, but ignore their substance.
They dismiss “ecomodernists”, who they say faulted Jacobson and others for envisaging a reduction in total energy consumption and for discounting nuclear power (page 171). But this misses the central point of the controversy: that Jacobson and co’s modelling of their ideal electricity system relied on absurdly optimistic assumptions, especially about how easily electricity can be stored and transported.
Jacobson and co’s initial critics complained that their work “omits the essential notion of trade-offs” in managing energy systems, and ignores “how renewable energy technologies relate to the broader set of options for meeting long-term societal goals like managing climate change”. They argued that Jacobson et al “gloss over fundamental implications of the technical and economic dimensions of intermittency”.[2]
A second, high-profile group of mainstream authors led by Christopher Clack rebutted Jacobson’s credibility-straining views of electricity storage and transportation, and pointed out some modelling errors. Jacobson thought this criticism so monstrous that he took the highly unusual step of threatening to sue the authors.[3]
Does this matter to socialists? In my view, it does. Technologies are not rabbits pulled out of hats. They are instruments of labour. We need to gauge what they can do now, and what they might be able to do in future. If Jacobson’s assumptions about electricity storage and transportation border on fantasy, that matters. It means the “energy transition” will not be as smooth as he portrays it.
In my view, these assumptions are of a piece with Jacobson’s insouciant dismissal of the idea that using land for solar farms might put pressure on other land uses. They fit, too, with his embarassingly naïve view that the gigantic human problem of lack of electricity access was caused by fossil fuels, and will disappear in an all-renewables world.[4]
Jacobson abstracts technologies from the society that creates and uses them, and treats them essentially as a magic wand. Malm and Carton, by presenting his vision uncritically, effectively reproduce it.
The technological answers are simple, they suggest; it remains only to clear capitalism out of the way.
Note for the sake of accuracy that, in Malm’s case, the magic bullets are always technologies, but not necessarily the same ones.
🔴 In 2020, it was direct capture of carbon from the air (the “central transitional demand for the coming years” should be the nationalisation of fossil fuel companies to “turn them into direct air capture utilities”[5]).
🔴 In 2021, he cast the net wider (the “left” must give up its technological “taboos” on nuclear power, centralised solar and “other large-scale infrastructure”, and end its “blanket rejection of any talk of geoengineering”[6]).
🔴 In 2025, he has opted more specifically for renewable electricity generation.
Malm and Carton’s second very basic mistake is to insist that “flow” energy resources such as solar and wind “appear without labour” and therefore “can not have value”.
Were sufficient renewable resources brought into the electricity market, they write, “the market will begin to drown in electricity of no value”; “under capitalist property relations, the flow hits a glass ceiling of sorts”.
Peter Somerville has already responded to this, pointing out that while wind and sunshine are not commodities – and so can be said not to have value – electricity produced with them in a capitalist economy certainly is a commodity.[7]
Malm and Carton claim:
The flow requires no more mining than wild apples. Once the ladder or stick for reaching them has been built, the picking can unfold with minimal material throughput.
Maybe. But Marx saw value being produced – in apples, coal, electricity, or any other commodity – not by material throughput, but by labour.
Coal appears without labour, just as sunshine does; one has to be dug out of the ground and burned in a power station, the other has to be gathered in photovoltaic cells and fed through an inverter. Coal-fired electricity is far more labour-intensive, and plays a deadly role in global heating. And the coal can only be used once. But none of this happens without labour, and renewably-produced electricity has always had value in the capitalist economy.
Instead of inventing for renewable technologies social powers they do not have, we should consider how they are actually used now, by capital, and how we can change that. (See for example, “Wind, water, solar and socialism” and “Pakistan’s rush for rooftop solar brings dreams and nightmares.”)
Malm and Carton’s third mistake combines the other two. They claim that a contradiction between profiteering and “stock” energy resources (fossil fuels) on one side, and human need and “flow” (renewables) on the other, will drive social change. This, in their view, is a 21st century manifestation of the tension between productive forces and social relations of production, that Marx wrote about. They write (page 232):
This passage, at the heart of Malm and Carton’s argument, is a rhetorical trick that I think misuses and misunderstands Marx.
It rests on the idea of “the amalgam of profits and stock” versus “one of needs and flow”. But this is just word play. “Flow”, i.e. renewable electricity generation, is clearly NOT identified simply with “needs”. Under capitalism, electricity is produced from sun, wind and water by labour; it is thereby inhered with value (as I have argued above); it is exchanged as a commodity. It is every bit as “amalgamated” with profit as coal or oil.
Of course labour could be freed of capitalist exploitation, but that can only happen as a result of social actions, of class struggle. An “amalgam” of “needs and flow” can not be a lever that will help to disrupt social relations, because it does not exist.
This leads to an interpretive point. What on earth do we think Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels meant, when they wrote about the tension of productive forces and the social relations of production?
Let’s go back to the original. Marx wrote, in the preface to his book, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:
Laying out a stirring vision of social change, Marx argues that it is this tension between productive forces and the social relations that gives rise to changes in people’s consciousness, not the other way around.
But the “productive forces” were not, in Marx’s understanding, a dry economic concept or a collection of technologies. They were the coming together of human labour and the instruments of labour, i.e. tools that were themselves the products of labour, to take from humans’ natural surroundings the means of subsistence and the basis of our culture.
The tensions between these processes and the constraints of feudal political and property structures had brought about the European social crisis of the 17th and 18th centuries, culminating in revolutions. Marx saw future socialist transformations as a potentially analogous process.
Throughout the 20th century, these concepts were often turned into a dogma by Marxists, who thought that the “productive forces”, in the form of mass production and other advances of technology, would automatically drive forward revolution.
A few years after Marx’s death, Engels had presciently gone out of his way to warn his comrades that Marx had never had such a wooden, one-dimensional view.
“According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining factor in history is the production and reproduction of real life. [That’s how Engels thought of “productive forces”.] Neither Marx nor I have ever asserted more than this”, Engels wrote in 1890 to the German social democrat Joseph Bloch.[8] “Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic factor is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, absurd phrase.”
Engels railed against the idea that this tension (productive forces / social relations of production) was something mechanical or deterministic. We make our history ourselves, he continued, but “under very definite antecedents and conditions”, among which “the economic ones are ultimately decisive”. Ultimately, not automatically.
Our world is so different from the one that Marx lived in that careful thought is in order when trying to apply the concepts he developed.
The working class in which Marx put so many hopes is hundreds of times more numerous, better educated, healthier and more socially combative than it was in his day. Technologies have developed in ways of which he could only have dreamed. He knew of electricity, but not power stations, electric motors, telephones or chemical fertilisers, let alone nuclear weapons, penicillin, the internet and other 20th century inventions.
There is a powerful case for situating our present global crises as the tension between productive forces and social relations of production, in my view: humanity, with the working class at the centre, has the creative ability to sustain itself and to deal with the perils inflicted on us by capital, from hunger and inequality to climate change. This ability, this potential, collides explosively with capital’s political structures.
This is a general framework for understanding the crises we are living through. And there is a rich history of socialists using it, specifically, to understand the relationship of social and technological change.[9]
By trying to twist it into an automatic technology-driven formula, Malm and Carton turn this framework upside down and inside out.
We know more than Marx could have known about how technologies, products of human labour, are shaped, warped and turned against humanity by the capital that controls them. The extent to which we can take control of technologies, make them ours again, will surely depend on how successfully we are able to mobilise social forces to defy, resist and challenge capital.
If we play rhetorical tricks with Marx (profit/stock, needs/flow), and endow technologies with mystical powers to solve what are really social questions, we are digging ourselves even more deeply into trouble. 23 April 2025.
About the picture. “Philosophy” was painted by Salvator Rosa (1615-1673) in about 1645 and is displayed in the National Gallery in London. The gallery’s notice states: “Wearing a scholar’s cap and gown, the philosopher scrutinises the viewer. His stern expression corresponds with the Latin inscription on the stone tablet: ‘Be silent, unless what you have to say is better than silence.’ Rosa was keenly interested in Stoic philosophy and used his own facial features for this characterisation.”
[1] Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, Overshoot: how the world surrendered to climate breakdown (Verso, 2024), chapter 6. If you are finding your way into the debate around Jacobson’s research, I would suggest starting with: David Roberts, “A beginner’s guide to the debate over 100% renewable energy”, Vox (2017), and S. Pirani, “We need social change, not miracles”, The Ecologist, July 2023
[2] The key original paper is: Mark Z. Jacobson et al, “Low-cost solution to the grid reliability problem with 100% penetration of intermittent wind, water and solar for all purposes”, PNAS 112: 49 (8 December 2015), 15060-15065. The initial critique is: J. Bistline and G. Blanford, “More than one arrow in the quiver: why ‘100% renewables’ misses the mark”, PNAS 113: 28 (12 July 2016), E3988
[3] C. Clack et al, “Evaluation of a proposal for reliable low-cost grid power with 100% wind, water and solar”, PNAS 114: 26 (27 June 2017), pp. 6722-6727. Apart from Jacobson’s, there are multiple “100% renewable” proposals. The nuclear advocate Ben Heard and his colleagues reviewed the literature, and listed papers by 13 research teams. See B.P. Heard et al, “Burden of proof: a comprehensive review of the feasibility of 100% renewable-electricity systems”, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 76 (2017), pp. 1122-1133; and a response, T.W. Brown et al, “Response to ‘Burden of proof’”, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 92 (2018), 834-847.
[4] Details in: Pirani, “We need social change, not miracles”, The Ecologist, July 2023
[5] A. Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: war communism in the twenty-first century (Verso, 2020), page 143. I commented on this in: S. Pirani, “The Direct Air Capture Road to Socialism”, Capitalism Nature Socialism 32:2 (2021), pages 132-136
[6] A. Malm, “Planning the Planet”, in J. Sapinski, H.J. Buck and A. Malm (eds.), Has it Come to This? The promises and perils of geoengineering on the brink (Rutgers University Press, 2021), page 157
[7] See Malm and Carton, Overshoot: how the world surrendered to climate breakdown (Verso, 2024), pages 171-172 and 208; Peter Somerville, “Overshoot: breaking through capital’s barriers to wind and solar”, People & Nature, November 2024
[8] F. Engels, Letter to Joseph Bloch in Konigsberg, September 1890
[9] See, for example, S. Pirani, “Luddism for the age of robotics”, The Ecologist, May 2021, and “‘The instrument of labour strikes down the labourer.’ Marx on machinery is worth reading”, People & Nature, June 2015.
Coal appears without labour, just as sunshine does; one has to be dug out of the ground and burned in a power station, the other has to be gathered in photovoltaic cells and fed through an inverter. Coal-fired electricity is far more labour-intensive, and plays a deadly role in global heating. And the coal can only be used once. But none of this happens without labour, and renewably-produced electricity has always had value in the capitalist economy.
Instead of inventing for renewable technologies social powers they do not have, we should consider how they are actually used now, by capital, and how we can change that. (See for example, “Wind, water, solar and socialism” and “Pakistan’s rush for rooftop solar brings dreams and nightmares.”)
Malm and Carton’s third mistake combines the other two. They claim that a contradiction between profiteering and “stock” energy resources (fossil fuels) on one side, and human need and “flow” (renewables) on the other, will drive social change. This, in their view, is a 21st century manifestation of the tension between productive forces and social relations of production, that Marx wrote about. They write (page 232):
The productive forces for powering all the world economy with the flow [that’s where Jacobson’s work comes in] will mature progressively. The contradiction between these forces and the property relations holding them back will then grow ever more intense.
In this version of the contradiction between [productive] forces and [social] relations, an amalgam of profits and stock is pitted against one of needs and flow. The property relations that compel owners of the means of production to always and ever strive for maximum profit have come to be one [??!] with fossil fuels. To make room for an economy runnning to 100% on the flow, these fetters would need to be burst asunder and energy production transferred to public control, a rule of the associated producers, that gives priority to the satisfaction of needs – the need for survival, first and foremost.
This passage, at the heart of Malm and Carton’s argument, is a rhetorical trick that I think misuses and misunderstands Marx.
It rests on the idea of “the amalgam of profits and stock” versus “one of needs and flow”. But this is just word play. “Flow”, i.e. renewable electricity generation, is clearly NOT identified simply with “needs”. Under capitalism, electricity is produced from sun, wind and water by labour; it is thereby inhered with value (as I have argued above); it is exchanged as a commodity. It is every bit as “amalgamated” with profit as coal or oil.
Of course labour could be freed of capitalist exploitation, but that can only happen as a result of social actions, of class struggle. An “amalgam” of “needs and flow” can not be a lever that will help to disrupt social relations, because it does not exist.
This leads to an interpretive point. What on earth do we think Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels meant, when they wrote about the tension of productive forces and the social relations of production?
Let’s go back to the original. Marx wrote, in the preface to his book, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:
At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production [or, in legal terms, the property relations]. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense infrastructure. […]
Laying out a stirring vision of social change, Marx argues that it is this tension between productive forces and the social relations that gives rise to changes in people’s consciousness, not the other way around.
But the “productive forces” were not, in Marx’s understanding, a dry economic concept or a collection of technologies. They were the coming together of human labour and the instruments of labour, i.e. tools that were themselves the products of labour, to take from humans’ natural surroundings the means of subsistence and the basis of our culture.
The tensions between these processes and the constraints of feudal political and property structures had brought about the European social crisis of the 17th and 18th centuries, culminating in revolutions. Marx saw future socialist transformations as a potentially analogous process.
Throughout the 20th century, these concepts were often turned into a dogma by Marxists, who thought that the “productive forces”, in the form of mass production and other advances of technology, would automatically drive forward revolution.
A few years after Marx’s death, Engels had presciently gone out of his way to warn his comrades that Marx had never had such a wooden, one-dimensional view.
“According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining factor in history is the production and reproduction of real life. [That’s how Engels thought of “productive forces”.] Neither Marx nor I have ever asserted more than this”, Engels wrote in 1890 to the German social democrat Joseph Bloch.[8] “Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic factor is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, absurd phrase.”
Engels railed against the idea that this tension (productive forces / social relations of production) was something mechanical or deterministic. We make our history ourselves, he continued, but “under very definite antecedents and conditions”, among which “the economic ones are ultimately decisive”. Ultimately, not automatically.
Our world is so different from the one that Marx lived in that careful thought is in order when trying to apply the concepts he developed.
The working class in which Marx put so many hopes is hundreds of times more numerous, better educated, healthier and more socially combative than it was in his day. Technologies have developed in ways of which he could only have dreamed. He knew of electricity, but not power stations, electric motors, telephones or chemical fertilisers, let alone nuclear weapons, penicillin, the internet and other 20th century inventions.
There is a powerful case for situating our present global crises as the tension between productive forces and social relations of production, in my view: humanity, with the working class at the centre, has the creative ability to sustain itself and to deal with the perils inflicted on us by capital, from hunger and inequality to climate change. This ability, this potential, collides explosively with capital’s political structures.
This is a general framework for understanding the crises we are living through. And there is a rich history of socialists using it, specifically, to understand the relationship of social and technological change.[9]
By trying to twist it into an automatic technology-driven formula, Malm and Carton turn this framework upside down and inside out.
We know more than Marx could have known about how technologies, products of human labour, are shaped, warped and turned against humanity by the capital that controls them. The extent to which we can take control of technologies, make them ours again, will surely depend on how successfully we are able to mobilise social forces to defy, resist and challenge capital.
If we play rhetorical tricks with Marx (profit/stock, needs/flow), and endow technologies with mystical powers to solve what are really social questions, we are digging ourselves even more deeply into trouble. 23 April 2025.
About the picture. “Philosophy” was painted by Salvator Rosa (1615-1673) in about 1645 and is displayed in the National Gallery in London. The gallery’s notice states: “Wearing a scholar’s cap and gown, the philosopher scrutinises the viewer. His stern expression corresponds with the Latin inscription on the stone tablet: ‘Be silent, unless what you have to say is better than silence.’ Rosa was keenly interested in Stoic philosophy and used his own facial features for this characterisation.”
[1] Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, Overshoot: how the world surrendered to climate breakdown (Verso, 2024), chapter 6. If you are finding your way into the debate around Jacobson’s research, I would suggest starting with: David Roberts, “A beginner’s guide to the debate over 100% renewable energy”, Vox (2017), and S. Pirani, “We need social change, not miracles”, The Ecologist, July 2023
[2] The key original paper is: Mark Z. Jacobson et al, “Low-cost solution to the grid reliability problem with 100% penetration of intermittent wind, water and solar for all purposes”, PNAS 112: 49 (8 December 2015), 15060-15065. The initial critique is: J. Bistline and G. Blanford, “More than one arrow in the quiver: why ‘100% renewables’ misses the mark”, PNAS 113: 28 (12 July 2016), E3988
[3] C. Clack et al, “Evaluation of a proposal for reliable low-cost grid power with 100% wind, water and solar”, PNAS 114: 26 (27 June 2017), pp. 6722-6727. Apart from Jacobson’s, there are multiple “100% renewable” proposals. The nuclear advocate Ben Heard and his colleagues reviewed the literature, and listed papers by 13 research teams. See B.P. Heard et al, “Burden of proof: a comprehensive review of the feasibility of 100% renewable-electricity systems”, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 76 (2017), pp. 1122-1133; and a response, T.W. Brown et al, “Response to ‘Burden of proof’”, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 92 (2018), 834-847.
[4] Details in: Pirani, “We need social change, not miracles”, The Ecologist, July 2023
[5] A. Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: war communism in the twenty-first century (Verso, 2020), page 143. I commented on this in: S. Pirani, “The Direct Air Capture Road to Socialism”, Capitalism Nature Socialism 32:2 (2021), pages 132-136
[6] A. Malm, “Planning the Planet”, in J. Sapinski, H.J. Buck and A. Malm (eds.), Has it Come to This? The promises and perils of geoengineering on the brink (Rutgers University Press, 2021), page 157
[7] See Malm and Carton, Overshoot: how the world surrendered to climate breakdown (Verso, 2024), pages 171-172 and 208; Peter Somerville, “Overshoot: breaking through capital’s barriers to wind and solar”, People & Nature, November 2024
[8] F. Engels, Letter to Joseph Bloch in Konigsberg, September 1890
[9] See, for example, S. Pirani, “Luddism for the age of robotics”, The Ecologist, May 2021, and “‘The instrument of labour strikes down the labourer.’ Marx on machinery is worth reading”, People & Nature, June 2015.
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