The Tragedy of the Worker Towards the Proletarocene

Facing irreversible climate change, the planet is en route to apocalypse

To understand the scale of what faces us and how it ramifies through every corner of our lives is to marvel at our inaction. Why aren’t we holding emergency meetings in every city, town and village every week?

What is to be done to create a planet where a communist horizon offers a new dawn to replace our planetary twilight? What does it mean to be a communist after we have hit a climate tipping point?

The Tragedy of the Worker is a brilliant, stringently argued pamphlet reflecting on capitalism’s death drive, the left’s complicated entanglements with fossil fuels, and the rising tide of fascism. In response, the authors propose Salvage Communism, a programme of restoration and reparation that must precede any luxury communism. They set out a new way to think about the Anthropocene. The Tragedy of the Worker demands an alternative future—the Proletarocene—one capable of repairing the ravages of capitalism and restoring the world.

The authors are collectively the editors of Salvage Magazine.

Jamie Allinson is a senior lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Edinburgh University
China Mieville is the author of a number of highly acclaimed and prize-winning novels including, most recently, The Last Days of New Paris; his non fiction includes October: The Story of the Russian Revolution.
Richard Seymour is a journalist who writes regularly for the Guardian, the London Review of Books, and Jacobin. His most recent books include The Twittering Machine and Corbyn.
Rosie Warren is chief editor of Salvage magazine and an editor at Verso.

Its website is www.salvage.zone