After deciding to exit, migrants can move to a range of potential destinations. Why do they choose one country over another? We again provide an overview of existing answers that identify economic factors – migration’s costs and benefits – and a migrant’s social network as the crucial variables driving destination choice. We instead highlight a destination country’s internal political environment and argue that migrants respond to the de jure and de facto political conditions that will shape life in their new home. These conditions include the bundle of citizenship rights and opportunities that destination countries confer, as well as the electoral success of anti-immigrant political parties and movements. Harnessing unique macro-level data in a gravity model of international migration, we find – for a set of wealthy destinations and then a global sample of countries – that these political factors exert a substantively important effect on migration flows from a wide array of sending countries.

In the ‘Paralipomena’ (or side notes) to On the Concept of History, Walter Benjamin (2003: 393) once criticized the Marxist conception of labour for its characteristic ‘exploitation of nature’. In an attempt to overcome the Promethean vision of revolution, Benjamin famously wrote:

The metaphor of the ‘emergency brake’ is more important than ever today. In the face of ecological disasters, environmentalism starts to demand radical systemic change by ending limitless economic growth in order to terminate the ceaseless exploitation of humanity and the robbery of nature. In short, today’s emergency brake implies a call for degrowth.

Marxism has been, however, unable to adequately respond to this call for degrowth. Even those eco-Marxists who are critical of productivism are reluctant to accept the idea of degrowth, which they believe is politically unattractive and ineffective. Instead, they stick to the possibility of further sustainable growth under socialism, once the anarchy of market competition under capitalism is transcended (Vergara-Camus 2019). Thus, even after the idea of ecosocialism has softened the long-lasting antagonism between Green and Red, there remains a significant tension between ecosocialism and degrowth. The situation is changing, however. One of the most important advocates of degrowth, Serge Latouche (2019: 65), has accepted the idea of ecosocialism as a basis for degrowth, advocating the need ‘to propose forms of politics in a way that is coherent with the objectives of the ecosocialist project for the next era’. Considering the fact that degrowth is often conceived as the third path alternative to both capitalism and socialism, there has been a remarkable shift in recent years among the proponents of degrowth in a clearly anti-capitalist direction. This opens up a space for new dialogues with Marxists, who have been critical of degrowth’s ambiguity in terms of its compatibility with the market economy. It is worth investigating further whether ‘socialism without growth’ (Kallis 2017) and ‘ecosocialist degrowth’ (Löwy et al. 2022) are compatible with Marx’s own vision of post-capitalism.

As seen in the previous chapter, numerous critics have accused Marx of ‘Prometheanism’, and even self-proclaimed Marxists have concluded that his productivism is incompatible with environmentalism. However, with the deepening ecological crises under neoliberal globalization, the need to critically investigate capitalism’s destructive influence upon the ecosystem has become much more pressing. Having rediscovered Marx’s ecology in this context, various ecosocialists today employ the concept of ‘metabolic rift’ in order to analyse environmental degradation under capitalist production. Consequently, ecology has become one of the central fields for enriching the legacy of Marx’s Capital in the 21st century. However, some Marxists still refuse to acknowledge the potentiality of Marx’s ecology, dismissing it as ‘apocalyptic’ (Harvey 1996: 194). In particular, ‘Western Marxism’ broadly defined is often dismissive of Marx’s ecosocialist project as an alternative to capitalism. For example, in an interview published in Examined Life, Slavoj Žižek ironically reformulates Marx’s famous remark, maintaining that ecology is ‘a new opium for the masses’ (Žižek 2009: 158). Alain Badiou (2008: 139) repeats exactly the same judgement.

One of the reasons for this denial of Marx’s ecology can be traced back to an old problem that pivots around the ‘intellectual relationship’ between Marx and Engels (Carver 1983), that is, the identity and difference of these two founders of socialism. It is well known that Western Marxism as initiated by Lukács regarded natural science as Engels’s domain of expertise, as in Adorno’s comment that Marx’s ‘concept of “nature” in which productivity is consummated, also remains underdeveloped, as does the famous expression “metabolism with nature”’ (Adorno 1974: 268). Since Western Marxism neglected Marx’s extensive research in the natural sciences and marginalized his central concept of ‘metabolism’, it now faces a dilemma in the Anthropocene. It cannot develop a Marxist critique of ecological degradation unless it admits its earlier one-sided interpretation of Marx’s social philosophy. Consequently, Western Marxists deny the possibility of Marx’s ecology in order to defend their own theoretical consistency.

In contrast to Adorno, Žižek and Badiou, John Bellamy Foster (2000) and Paul Burkett (1999) adopted a more fruitful approach to the intellectual relationship between Marx and Engels. They not only pay attention to Marx’s engagement with natural science but also effectively employ his methodological framework in order to analyse current environmental issues, demonstrating the relevance of Marx’s ecology in today’s world.

For quite a long time, Marx’s interest in ecological issues was neglected even among serious Marxist scholars. Marx’s socialism was said to be characterized by a ‘Promethean’ (pro-technological, anti-ecological) advocacy for the domination of nature. Marxists, on the one hand, reinforced this impression by negatively reacting to environmentalism, which they believed to be inherently anti-working class and only functioning as an ideology of the upper middle class. On the other hand, the environmental catastrophe in the USSR – most notably represented by the ecological collapse of the Aral Sea and the Chernobyl disaster – reinforced the conviction among environmentalists that socialism cannot establish a sustainable society. As a consequence, there emerged a long-standing antagonism between the Red and the Green in the second half of the 20th century.

The situation is changing in the 21st century. No matter how devastating actually existing socialism was to the environment, its collapse and the triumph of capitalism has only contributed to further ecological degradation under neoliberal globalization in the last few decades. The ineffectiveness of conventional market-based solutions to ecological issues resulted in a renewed interest in more heterodox approaches including Marxian economics (Burkett 2006). At the same time, the collapse of the USSR and the declining influence of the past dogmas of orthodox Marxism ‘open up an intellectual horizon and a field of reflection, where theoretical and conceptual issues could be discussed without being foreclosed by party-line polemics or divisive political loyalties’ (Therborn 2009: 90). This situation both within and without Marxism led to the ‘rediscovery’ of Marx’s ecology in the last two decades (I).

It was Istvan Mészáros’s theory of ‘social metabolism’ that paved the solid path to this rediscovery. By investigating Mészáros’s theory of metabolism, mainly developed in Beyond Capital and The Necessity of Social Control, Marx’s ecological theory of ‘metabolic rift’ can be more firmly founded upon his critique of political economy (II). This clarification helps classify the three different dimensions of ‘metabolic rift’ in Marx’s Capital (III). Correspondingly, there are three dimensions of shifting the ecological rift, which is why capital proves so elastic and resilient in the face of economic and ecological crises. However, these ‘metabolic shifts’ never solve the deep contradictions of capitalist accumulation. Rather, they only create new crises, intensifying the contradictions on a wider scale (IV).

As discussed in Part I, the concept of metabolism is crucial for a Marxian analysis of the global ecological crisis in the Anthropocene. However, persistent criticisms are directed against those eco-Marxists who seek to develop the concept of metabolic rift. The criticisms have been reinforced recently as those political ecologists who problematize the concept of the Anthropocene as an anthropocentric and Eurocentric narrative also maintain that eco-Marxists are not only productivist but also dualist. According to critics, the dualist notions of nature’s ‘revenge’ and ‘metabolic rift’ are unable to properly grasp the historical dynamics of ecological crises caused by capitalist accumulation.

This chapter, following Marx’s ecological analysis and method, defends his ecosocialist realism in a non-Cartesian manner against monist conceptions of the world. While many critiques of the Anthropocene narrative are valid, they do not immediately justify the claim that monism is superior to dualism in conceptualizing the current ecological crisis (I). The problem of monism becomes particularly visible when investigating influential discourses in current environmental geography. Prominent critiques of Cartesian dualism of Society and Nature in the Marxist tradition come from Neil Smith’s ‘production of nature’ and Jason W. Moore’s ‘world-ecology’. Although their reconceptualization of the human–nature relationship looks quite radical at first glance, a series of theoretical difficulties in these monist approaches become discernible upon closer examination.

There are obviously significant differences between Smith and Moore. David Harvey’s critique of neo-Malthusianism in the 1970s heavily influenced Smith’s ‘production of nature’ approach. Their fear of Malthusianism, however, made them dissolve real natural limits into a social construction, so both Harvey and Smith were hesitant to recognize the necessity of integrating environmentalism into the Marxian critique of capitalism. In fact, the ‘production of nature’ approach is haunted by an illegitimate kind of anthropocentrism, which undermines nature’s independence and autonomy as non-identical with society. Consequently, they ended up underestimating the impact of the global ecological crisis under capitalism (II).

In contrast, Moore’s treatment of the ecological crisis is characterized by a determined negation of anthropocentrism. Through his monist concept of oikeios, he denounces advocates of ‘metabolic rift’ for falling into a ‘Cartesian dualism’ of Society and Nature.

Through discussions in previous chapters, various productivist approaches characteristic of Marxism turned out to be inadequate to formulate a response to the economic and ecological crises of the Anthropocene. Technocratic visions, despite their bold claims of emancipation, reproduce the non-democratic and consumerist relations of domination and subjugation that exist under capitalism. Furthermore, capitalist development does not guarantee the transcendence of the contradictory character of the capitalist mode of production because ‘productive forces of capital’ as an art of robbery severely deform the human metabolic relationship with nature, without providing a material foundation for the future society. This is not a new problem. In the 1860s Marx became increasingly aware of this problem while writing Capital, but due to the persistent understanding of the philosophical foundations of Marx’s historical materialism as the unilateral progress of universal human history driven by the development of productive forces, his vision of revolution tended to be reduced to a Promethean one, as if the maximal acceleration of the existing tendencies of capitalism could ultimately realize a final leap to communism.

Marx’s own remarks reinforce this impression. Even in the well-known passage from the preface to A Contribution in 1859, Marx famously wrote, for example: ‘No social formation is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society’ (MECW 29: 263). This kind of assumption can easily be read as productivist, but such an interpretation is untenable today because the acceleration of productive forces will sooner or later make most of the planet inhabitable before the collapse of capitalism.

It is understandable that environmentalists often show disdain for Marxism. In fact, historical materialism is unpopular today. This is a pity considering their shared interest in criticizing capital’s insatiable desire for accumulation, though from different perspectives. Admitting the inadequacy and flaws of Promethean Marxism, this chapter attempts to finally resolve the tension between Red and Green. By revisiting Marx’s own texts, I re-examine whether a path exists to reconcile the long antagonism between Green and Red and to build a new Front Populaire in defence of the planet in the Anthropocene.

Joseph Schumpeter (1951: 293) once said, ‘Capitalism is a process, a stationary capitalism would be a contradictio in adjecto.’ Degrowth is incompatible with capitalism, and it is essentially an anti-capitalist project. However, there has been little intellectual dialogue between degrowth and Marxism in the past mainly because of the latter’s alleged Prometheanism. This needs to change, and, fortunately, it has already started to change with advocacy for an ‘ecosocialist degrowth’ (Löwy et al. 2022). This situation reflects the theoretical and practical progress of political ecology in the last two decades.

Today, the existence of Marx’s ecology has become undeniable thanks to recent robust attempts by Marxian scholars to critically comprehend the historical dynamics of capital accumulation and its contradictions from an ecological perspective, especially by those ecosocialists who employ the concept of ‘metabolic rift’. This concept opened up a space of critical engagements with other traditions of environmentalism and political ecology, including degrowth. In this context, the recent renaissance of degrowth theory provides a great opportunity to re-examine and update Marx’s vision of a post-scarcity economy. Also inspired by new findings from the MEGA, this book attempted to decisively liberate Marxism from productivist ‘socialism’ by reinterpreting the late Marx as a ‘degrowth communist’.

The positive elaboration of Marx’s vision of post-capitalist society in this book is also an attempt to respond to those who doubt the fruitfulness of investigating Marx’s ecology in his notebooks. It is true that the existence of Marx’s ecology alone does not necessarily mean that his insights are useful today nor justify the need to engage with his political economy. Thus, critics express concerns about whether Marx’s ecology can be applied to the contemporary world because the economic and ecological situation in the 21st century is wholly different from his time, and the level of scientific knowledge is incomparable. Others object that such a ‘greening’ of Marx’s critique of capitalism is a mere imposition of ‘our’ concerns upon Marx’s text, distorting and neglecting the deep flaws and limitations in Marx’s theory. Due to the ‘obsolescence’ of Marx’s theory, critics even conclude that ‘Marxism has become so theoretically marginal that hopes for an “ecological Marx” are now best regarded as illusory’ (Boggs 2020: 83).

The world is on fire. We are experiencing ‘the end of the end of history’ (Hochuli, Hoare and Cunliffe 2021). With the rapid deepening of the global ecological crisis in various forms such as climate change, oxidation of the ocean, disruption of the nitrogen cycle, desertification, soil erosion and loss of biodiversity, Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of ‘the end of history’ after the collapse of the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) (Fukuyama 1992) is approaching a totally unexpected dead end today, namely the end of human history. In fact, the triumph of neoliberal globalization only accelerated the rapid increase in environmental impacts upon the earth by human activities since the end of the Second World War – the so called ‘Great Acceleration’, the age in which all major socio-economic and Earth system trends record a hockey stick pattern of increase (McNeil and Engelke 2016) – and ultimately destabilized the foundation of human civilization. Pandemic, war and climate breakdown are all symptomatic of ‘the end of history’, putting democracy, capitalism and ecological systems into chronic crisis.

Many people are well aware of the fact that the current mode of living is heading towards catastrophe, but the capitalist system does not offer an alternative to the juggernaut of overproduction and overconsumption. Nor is there any compelling reason to believe that it will soon do so because capitalism’s systemic compulsion continues to employ fossil fuel consumption despite consistent warnings, knowledge and opposition. Considering the fact that rapid, deep decarbonization that could meet the 1.5-degree-Celsius target of the Paris Agreement requires thorough transformative changes in virtually every sphere of society, more radical social movements embracing direct action have emerged, demanding to uproot the capitalist system (Extinction Rebellion 2019). In this context, when Greta Thunberg denounced the ‘fairy tales of eternal growth’ in a speech, she made it explicit that the capitalist system that aims for infinite accumulation on a finite planet is the root cause of climate breakdown.

This represents a new historical situation, especially to Marxism that has been treated like ‘a dead dog’ after the collapse of actually existing socialism. As environmentalists learn to unequivocally problematize the irrationality of the current economic system, Marxism now has a chance of revival if it can contribute to enriching debates and social movements by providing not only a thorough critique of the capitalist mode of production but also a concrete vision of post-capitalist society.