The pursuit of a world without war and environmental destruction is ultimately a quest for a life after capitalism. As Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson argue in their contribution to the “Pluriverse of Peace” text series, this is a multilevel transitional process that requires a world politics capable of addressing heterogeneous conditions of domination and exploitation while articulating a common desire for liberation.
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The concept of transition seems almost opposite to that of apocalypse. It implies the world is going somewhere. Where or to what, we might not know. But transition works against the sense of an ending. The concept seems to carry a glimmer of hope, even if, as we all know in times as dark as those in which we live, things are getting worse. The planet is enduring multiple and concatenating crises: wars, runaway climate change, deepening inequalities, decreased capacities for social reproduction, border conflicts, and the epistemic collapse brought by AI, just to name the most prominent.
Yet for every current crisis, there seems to be a parallel transition: a geopolitical transition, an ecological transition, an energy transition, a digital transition, to name only the most conspicuous. What are we to make of these proliferating transitions? And how do they intersect the current conjuncture, which emerges only through the projection of a non-existent unity onto the disjunctive times and spaces of the present?
Little more than survival
A challenge in writing about transition is that it can seem like it is always happening. But it is easy to say the same thing about the end of the world. Just think of the millenarians in Britian’s seventeenth century interregnum or the dark forebodings that accompanied the mid-twentieth century coming of the nuclear era. Apocalyptic thought pervades revolutionary dreams of blasting through history as much as anthropological visions of cultural dissolution. And while it resonates in Hindu and Buddhist myths of deluge, it seems forever complicit with Western drives to dominance and universalism. Even in the present, when the fear of an end accompanies the escalating dangers of climate change, the efforts of activist groups like Last Generation to block routes of logistical circulation and fossil fuel consumption seem barely to stall this push.
Catastrophism brings a will to power, a thrust toward a totality that contains and destroys all humans and things. Ecomodernist fantasies of a technological exit from this mess turn back on themselves, seeking to save the world through an acceleration that augurs little more than survival. Meanwhile, advocates of resilience embrace an eschatology that hovers between letting go and controlling time through practices of self-management and adaptation. Yet in the face of all this finality, life goes on. Beyond any waiting or salvation, there is time.
Transition to communism
Transition stages itself in the hiatus between time’s passing and duration. It implies a movement to something else, sometime else, somewhere else. For us, it remains important to speak of a transition to communism. We understand this is a transition with a history, with dead-ends, disappointments, and tragic outcomes. Yet, as long as capital embeds itself in social relations, there is a need for political rupture, for a transition rooted in the diversity of social struggles and the differences and conflicts they embody.
We do not think that capital explains everything: wars, global warming, Indigenous experiences, sexism and racism, the violences of genocide and colonialism. Nor do we imagine that a single political subject, some replacement of or successor to the industrial working class, might propel the world toward a new Elysium. For us, communism is not an idyll or a utopia. While a basic condition for its realization is the abolition of private property, its attainment does not lie in the pursuit of an absolute communality that negates all forms of possession. Rather than envisioning an entirely pacified, heavenly society, we understand communism to establish channels for the articulation of ongoing struggles.
This does not mean that the transition to communism must herd myriad social struggles into an unstoppable dialectical push. Nothing is given or inevitable. We are speaking of a transition that requires massive political organization, a means of translating between different struggles in different parts of the world, undoing and remaking political subjectivities, and the forging of a new internationalism. To this extent, the transition to communism is given in the plural, in the movement between many transitions.
Beyond rightward swings
So what is changing in the world today? It seems almost obligatory to jump to recent political debacles, to the sad reality that it is the Right rather than the Left that seems to be offering populations a historic exit from neoliberalism. But while capitalism is certainly subject to internal transitions, as the transition from industrial capitalism to neoliberalism itself demonstrates, it is far from clear that such an exit is immanent. It is not just a question of the compatibility of neoliberal dicta and governance practices with the nationalism and strengthening of borders favored by the Right and, increasingly, by sections of the Left.
It is also about the persistence of global processes and linkages that can coexist with, and even override, nationalist tendencies. Consider the focus on trade in so-called populist politics preoccupied with jobs and tariffs. Despite an emerging reactionary internationalism surrounding politicians like Trump, Putin, Modi, and Milei, trade, like migration, remains a central concern of their platforms. This is the case notwithstanding the fact that turnover in global financial markets far exceeds trade figures between any of the relevant nations and evidences the high degrees of integration to which the world economy continues to be subject. To discern current vectors of transition we need to look beyond rightward swings, and to turn our analytical attention to global processes and operations that at once outflank and enmesh with nationalist recoils.
Proceeding in this way gives a new angle on the current proliferation of transitions. For instance, it becomes possible to situate the wars that have deepened and exploded in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic in a shift toward an unstable multipolarity in which the relations between capitalism and territorialism are undergoing important mutations – rather than seeing these wars simply as driven by great power rivalries. Nation-states compete not primarily for sovereign control over territory, although territorial clashes still flash up, as in the cases of Ukraine and Taiwan, and territorial ambitions still exist, as in the U.S. aspirations surrounding Greenland. Today, states are more interested in taming and controlling the fractured and variable geometries of the changing world system, especially those associated with financial and logistical operations and the extraction of raw materials.
This is evident in the U.S.’s use of the dollar as a tool of financial dominance, China’s Belt and Road initiative, or Russia’s control of fossil fuel flows. It is also clear in the rising tensions over the Panama Canal and in Israel’s framing of the Gaza war as a contest between the ‘curse’ of Iran and its allies across the Middle East and the ‘blessing’ of an open logistical route between India and Europe based on accords with Saudi Arabia and other nations. In this optic, war is not a sign of the world ending but rather the index of the end of a world order based in liberal precepts and U.S. hegemony.
Connecting anti-war and climate struggles
Ecological catastrophe is probably the strongest driver of apocalyptic visions today. With the term ecological transition, we refer to the whole set of social, technological, economic, and political adjustments necessary to address a host of interconnected issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, water and air pollution, overfishing, waste production, ocean acidification, natural resource depletion, soil degradation, and urbanization. Here, the question of the relation between environmental change and capitalism poses a problem. While we don’t think that capitalism provides a full explanation for ecological degradation, we take seriously arguments about capital’s exploitation of ‘cheap nature’ and pushing of the limits of the social metabolism with nature.
Debates about degrowth, ecomodernism, or planetary realism raise the question of whether an ecological transition necessarily involves a transition to a life after capitalism. Yet, even if we answer this question affirmatively, the issue remains as to whether this life should take the form of small, local collectivized societies capable of pursuing sustainability or involve a proletarian-led energy transition that seeks to resolve the ecological contradictions inherent in class society itself.
Our interest is not to choose or mediate between these positions. Rather we observe that the debate on ecological transition often plays itself out in a context separated from current geopolitical and geoeconomic dynamics. Today the political task of connecting anti-war and climate struggles assumes new urgency. It is not simply a matter of war having devastating environmental consequences. Nor is only a question of war offering a blunt instrument to address the systemic issues of capitalism, of which environmental challenges provide a stark reminder. The nexus of geopolitics, geoeconomics, and environmental crisis comes clearly into view when we center the question of energy transition within that of ecological transition, recognizing that efforts of decarbonization must necessarily involve the redesign and reorganization of actually existing energy systems and economies.
In this respect, China’s current lead position in the control of supply chains for critical minerals and renewable energy hardware is a primary factor. As is the ‘drill, baby, drill’ ethos that has reanimated fossil capitalism in the U.S. and hastened the rollback of industrial policies for subsidizing and derisking the energy transition. It is important to remember that not only large imperial states are involved in these dynamics and that almost everywhere the turn to renewables has been accompanied by increased fossil fuel extraction and consumption. Yet, even as capitalism faces obstacles in financing and profiting from renewables, a perspective that takes the energy transition as a means of spurring a transition to life after capitalism must operate in the context of a fractured, multipolar geopolitical environment. As such, the issue is less a decision to be made in favor of degrowth, ecomodernism or some other approach and a more pragmatic matter of the resources and technologies available for collectively managing energy systems at relevant scales.
The intertwining of transitions
The intertwining of geopolitical, ecological, and energy transitions is just one example of how current transitions intersect. We could multiply instances, looking at how digital transitions and AI cut across the transformations of social reproduction, for example, or topologies of border closure and opening. Our point is (1) that any discussion of a transition to communism or life after capitalism today must grapple with this proliferation of transitions. And (2) that it is not a matter of the transition to communism providing a master narrative that absorbs and reconciles all these other transitions into a single trajectory of organization and struggle.
In “The Rest and the West: Capitalism and Power in a Multipolar World,” we describe how the capitalist world system is being reorganized around multiple poles that fracture geographies of power and wealth into nesting operative spaces and transnational conduits of production and circulation that at once diverge and overlap at the world level. Contemporary regimes of war are embedded in and simultaneously extend across these polar arrangements. In this situation, the politics of imagining a life after capitalism must necessarily be a world politics. But such a politics must be capable of addressing heterogeneous conditions of domination and exploitation while articulating a common desire for liberation.
In other words, it must be as open to difference as it is to unifying tendencies. The politics of transition is necessarily a politics of translation, riddled with exchanges, transfusions, and encounters with the untranslatable that shift and unsettle established subjectivities and claims to nativism. The politics of apocalypse, on the other hand, seeks to erase all difference in a totalizing rush toward nothingness. This is why visions of the end of the world, whether driven by climate eschatologies or other narratives of closure, tend to impede a politics that seeks to abolish a world based on colonial and capitalist conquest.